In Search Of Excellence - The Vuori Story - From Cash Crunch to an $8 Billion Valuation | E174

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Joe Kudla, Founder & CEO of Vuori, reveals the real playbook behind one of the fastest-growing performance lifestyle brands. We unpack the decisions and economics between direct-to-consumer vs. wholesale, community-led growth, cash-flow discipline, fundraising (from early tranches to secondaries), hiring and culture systems, ambassador strategy, operational excellence, and how Extreme Preparation and a 100/100 work ethic compound into a secret weapon to success.  If you’re building a consumer brand, apparel/DTC company, or high-performance team, this episode is a masterclass in strategy and execution.What You’ll Learn:• The origins of Vuori and why the market was primed for a new kind of performance lifestyle brand blending technical fabrics with California ease.• Why wholesale under-expressed the vision and how Vuori’s pivot to a direct-to-consumer business unlocked authentic community, faster feedback loops, and hugely profitable growth.• Fundraising in the messy middle: bridging cash crunches, raising in tranches, and choosing investors who back the mission—not just the model.• Operating with discipline after secondary rounds: how to avoid “easy money” bad habits and keep teams scrappy, focused, and cash-flow aware.• Learning how the company has paid its original investors and early employees more than $1 billion.• Hiring for “fit + range” over resume, building values people can feel, and creating systems (like no-meeting time blocks) that protect deep work.Chapters / Key Moments 00:00 – Intro & Why This Conversation Matters09:47 – Why Vuori & Joe’s Origin Story17:34 – Raising Over $1 Billion To Give To Their Investors19:27 – First Hires & Building the Team28:59 – Wholesale Lessons & Retail Reality38:28 – The DTC Pivot & Strategy48:04 – Purpose, Values & Culture Systems57:39 – IPO Readiness: Pros & Cons67:16 – Closing / Final TakeawaysAbout Our Guest — Joe KudlaFounder & CEO, Vuori. Joe is the entrepreneur behind Vuori, a global performance lifestyle brand known for technical apparel, premium materials, effortless style, and community-centric growth. He’s scaled from startup scarcity and near failure to international reach by pairing cash-flow discipline with brand-first thinking, values-driven leadership, and a relentless commitment to product and culture.Guest Links:Vuori: https://vuoriclothing.comJoe Kudla (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekudla/Want to Work One-on-One with Me?I coach a small group of high achievers on how to elevate their careers, grow their businesses, and reach their full potential both professionally and personally.If you're ready to change your life and achieve your goals, apply here: https://www.randallkaplan.com/coaching Listen to my Extreme Preparation TEDx Talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIvlFpoLfgs Listen to this episode on the go!Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-search-of-excellence/id1579184310Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/23q0XICUDIchVrkXBR0i6L For more information about this episode, visit https://www.randallkaplan.com/ Follow Randall!Instagram: @randallkaplan LinkedIn:  @randallkaplan TikTok:  @randall_kaplan Twitter / X: https://x.com/RandallKaplanWebsite: https://www.randallkaplan.com/1-on-1 Coaching: https://www.randallkaplan.com/coachingCoaching and Staying Connected:1-on-1 Coaching | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | LinkedIn

My vision was to build something that had real depth and meaning that would inspire people to live their lives, to move their bodies, to feel their best on the journey of life. How important is work ethic to our success? The idea of work-life balance on the path of entrepreneurship or building a great career, it's not a nine to five job. You have to feel it at a gut level. And that means you are obsessing on it, you are thinking about it, you are manifesting it into existence. And that doesn't come from a balanced approach. It comes from an obsession and a passion. Welcome to The Search of Excellence.

My guest today is Joe Kudla, the CEO and founder of the exciting clothing brand Viori, one of my favorites, one of the fastest growing, most successful clothing brands in the world. Joe, welcome to my show. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Randy. Excited to be here. I want to go through the fundraising step by step. But before that, I just want to talk about your board, because boards influence, give you advice and mentorship, et cetera, et cetera. Some boards work out. Some boards don't work out. But you had Chris Miller on your board. You had, I think, his pronounces is Mike. Magerman? And then Jason Maras. He was an investor, not on board. Okay, he was an investor. So how important,

is it in choosing the right board? And then at what point you know you may have to upgrade your board or get different specialization that you did have before? Our journey was very holistic. Like we started out in a garage and we didn't have a board. The board was myself, Chris, and then eventually a guy named Mike Persol joined the board when he invested. Michael Magerman wasn't on the board, but he was a really great mentor and a great friend. He had started Odyssey Golf and was one of the first checks written in the business. So he was always a phone call away. But we actually didn't organize ourselves with a typical board of directors in those early days. But I would always find these mentors and people that I could call, which were really important to me on that journey. Your first two employees,

Nikki and Rebecca, were critical to the ultimate success of the business. They stayed a very long time. How did you choose the right people? Because one of the greatest mistakes as a mentor and professional coach. I've coached hundreds of people over the years is they choose the wrong partner. It's either a friend or someone they don't do their due diligence on and they don't really know enough about their background. You know, I'd like to say that I conducted a lengthy search and went through thousands of resumes to find the right people. But the truth was, I've always felt there's been a bit of an angel on our shoulder guiding us on this journey. And, you know, Nikki was one of the first people I met who had a marketing background. Nicky Bray. No, Nicky Sequelio. Oh, Nikki

Sicilia, and then Rebecca Bray. And then Rebecca Bray. And Nikki had this really interesting background. She had come up through action sports. She worked at a brand called O.P. Ocean Pacific. You'd probably remember that brand. Yeah, it's great. She worked in marketing there. And eventually she went to work for a company called Prana, which is a company based here in Carlsbad. It was like surfing, climbing, outdoor brand. And a friend recommended that we meet. And, you know, I'm that guy, I'm thinking about at the time. She's a director of at this, you know, pretty big company and had this great career. And I'm this entrepreneur that had some success in a finance company, was 0 for two in apparel. But we sat down and we just talked about the market. We talked about our town, where we're from. We talked about

where the industry was going. By the end of this conversation, I felt like we were finishing each other's sentences on why has there not been a brand that has done this? You know, the marketplace at the time was dominated by sports brands. You know, you think about the big titans of industry that are distributed at mass market. They have big logos, shiny synthetic materials. It was all product that worked great if you were playing a sport, but it identified you as like a jock or somebody that was like going to compete in a sport. And like yoga and CrossFit and, you know, Soul Cycle and Equinox and all these studio fitness concepts were coming. And it was like way more casual. It was more social. It was like exercising was becoming this community.

oriented thing, but there wasn't product that reflected it. And there wasn't product that was inspired by this coastal Southern California lifestyle that was built to perform, but it had more of an effortless aesthetic that you just wanted to live in. You just wanted to wear it all the time because it was comfortable. It wasn't overbranded. It had like fabrics that performed like technical fabrics, but looked and felt like naturals. Like that was, it was a vision that we shared. Nobody in Encinitas was wearing the big mainstream active wear brands. We were like, why is that? Because there was a culture gap.

So we thought to ourselves, what if we could build product that people here in Encinitas would resonate with? That would support them through sweating and working out or going to yoga or going for a run. But had an aesthetic they actually vibed with. And she saw the exact same thing. And she was always saying, I always wondered why Prana didn't modernize their assortment to feel a little bit more like this. So she was seeing and feeling the same thing. And so we just knew it was a great partnership. And the same thing. Rebecca had this incredible background. She'd worked for fashion brands. She'd worked for surf brands. She had worked in golf. She understood technical. But she had an aesthetic, a natural. Her natural style was effortless in coastal California. She was like the perfect designer to help bring this vision to life. They were the first, pretty much the first two people that I met and the three of us became a team.

There's moments in our career that people tell us things that we don't want to hear. We're raising money for our tech company. We're in Silicon Valley. We get all these meetings with these best firms. We're at Benchmark. I had three partners, three co-founders, our tech company. They're in Boston. I'm in L.A., and I'm going to commute back and forth.

And I remember, after the meeting ends, I go to the bathroom, the partner who is going to be our partner in the case, a famous guy. I'm not going to mention his name. We're at the Euro-No next to each other. And there's nothing weird going on. He said to me, Randy, it's not going to work. I said, well, I said, well, it's not going to work. He said, you being in Los Angeles, it's not going to work. And I said, you're not going to be in the action. You've got to be part of a team. There's four of you as founders. And ultimately, I thought about it. I said, man, this guy doesn't fucking know what he's talking about. And then in the next week and the next week is you find yourself more and more disassociated from the growth of the company. I said, you know what? He's right. He was right. It didn't affect the ultimate success of the company because they ended up leaving. He was right. It didn't work. But sometimes on a related note, we start. on one path and we think it's going to work. And then we say, holy shit, we need a complete

turnaround. So tell us about how you guys got started, what the distribution model is. And then going to New York for a meeting, I think it was with Bloomingdale. And someone tells me, hey, Joe, man, this ain't going to happen. Yeah. It was Equinox, actually. Equinox, which was owned by one of my classmates, Jeff Blau. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we got our samples together. And we went to market. That was the first trip I made was I took my samples to New York. I got meetings with anybody that would meet with me. One of them was Equinox because at the time, if you wanted to build a premium athletic offering, Nordstrom didn't sell premium activeware. Everybody sold it. So it didn't really exist in wholesale. So the way that you would build distribution was with yoga studios and gyms.

And Equinox was the big player on the field. They were the ones that had, you know, 80 plus gyms and every one of them had a little boutique. And they sold the coolest activeware. And it was mostly women's because for men, it didn't, the category didn't really exist. So I get a meeting with Equinox and I show them my product and they looked at it and they were like, this is never going to sell in New York. They're like, it looks like swimwear or it doesn't look like active wear. And that was inherently our whole brand value prop was like we were like, we were building technical product that didn't look like it. That was like our whole reason for being. It was built to move in, styled for life. And we were a truly a new perspective on our category. But

they didn't see it. When it was just product hanging on a rack, you were like, I don't see the vision. I don't get it. And so largely we came back, you know, a couple of yoga studios bought some of the product, you know, sold into some yoga studios on the West Coast. But man, it was tough. In the women's space, there were brands that were launching these small little yoga-tight collections and having great success selling at yoga studios because there were so many people practicing yoga. They were building these great, it was like a little cottage industry, people doing it out of their house or a small office building a great little $10 million business. I was like, there's nobody doing it for men's. This is an opportunity. Well, it turned out,

men weren't shopping for clothes at yoga studios. So the distribution we did get, there was no sell through. It was really tough. We had a vision for the brand, but that wasn't being expressed through wholesale. At wholesale, we were just the same thing that Equinox buyers saw. They saw a couple of shorts hanging on a rack. They didn't get it. So we came to terms with the fact that we were on a one-way course towards running out of money. And we had raised a little bit of friends and family. Again, I'd poured everything I had into it and things were not going well. I hadn't taken a salary. This is where like probably a year and a half into this, two years into this journey that I haven't been taking a salary. It was really tough. And that was the time where we just came to

terms with the fact that if we are going to have any success, we're going to have to build it direct. At the time, you know, those D to C brands, Warby Parker, you know, Casper, you were starting to see these D to C brands emerge and venture capital was starting to come into these direct-to-consumer brands. And so we knew we didn't have a huge budget. We were like, we need to take every dollar we have left and try to learn how to market the brand on social media. And it sounds like funny because, you know, now everybody does that. But at the time, Instagram had just launched their ads platform. So people were just starting to advertise on Instagram. And Facebook was a little bit more established, but still very early days. We took every dollar we had left.

We became obsessed with reaching the consumer directly. And we did it two ways. We opened a pop-up retail store in our backyard here in Encinitas. And we can talk more about that. But we created, it wasn't even really a store. It was more like a community gathering space where we had some product. But we were doing fitness classes. We were hosting art shows and parties and bringing entrepreneurs together to have events. And it became this thriving place where people would gather and have a lot of fun together. Free popsicles. Yeah. All kinds of cool stuff.

And then we went all in on a direct-to-consumer strategy. Every dollar, we hired a digital marketing agency. And I thought it was insane how much they wanted to charge us. And how much money they needed is a commitment in digital advertising. I'm like, that's all our money. We're going to literally, so we kind of had to bet the farm on this strategy. And very quickly, a dollar of advertising was generating a dollar of sales. So we were essentially losing money.

but then before you know it, a dollar became $2 and then $3 of revenue. And we started sending post-purchase surveys and we listened to customers and we listened to customers in our pop-up. And we quickly learned that like men were doing a lot of things in the product, but they weren't wearing it to yoga. Yoga was like actually way down on the list. They were running in it. They were going to the gym in it.

They loved how comfortable it was. And they all commented that it was really versatile, that they could wear it outside the gym. We found out that a lot of people were wearing it as much as lifestyle clothing as the people were wearing it to the gym because they resonated with the materials and the comfort and the fit. And so we started regurgitating back to the consumer what they were telling us. We started running ads that just said like run, train, surf, hike, travel, chill and like showing all of our shorts on the bottom of the screen and just doing creative advertising, really just reflecting back what the consumer was telling us they were using it for. And those ads,

started to gain more and more momentum. And so slowly, but surely, you started to see this community form. Customers were doing all the work. They loved the product. It was so different that people were working out in it and it didn't look like anything that existed before it. So they were taking photos of it, tagging us. And then we would take that. We didn't even have to create original content. We would just repost that. And our whole community became just a community of people wearing our product, using it out in the world. That became our brand. Before you know it, this community started to build on social. And that's when the wholesale account started to understand that what we were saying all along, that we were different, that this was a different

take on the category. They started to see it and understand it. Then they started to understand how they could merchandise it into their mix. And that's when we started to build momentum. enjoying this video so far, but before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lift and Seagate, and I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than $15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey, and at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did.

In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video.

You're listening to part two of my incredible interview with Joe Kudla, the amazing founder and CEO of Viori, one of the most exciting, fastest growing clothing brands in the world. If you have any of the list, to part one, be sure to check that one out first. Now without further ado, here's part two of my amazing interview with Joe. One thing I just want to go back is people really don't get something that you said. And I know this because I meet with a lot of founders and said, okay, well, I can spend a dollar on social or marketing and get a, dollar in sales, so I'm break even. You're not break even, right? Because you have margin and you have a cost of doing business and you're losing 70 cents on the dollar, maybe more on that. So you do

need $2.00 of revenue for each marketing spend that you have. Let's go back for a second because how close were you to going out of business? And at what point, what was the lowest amount of money you had in your bank account? We probably got down to around $20,000 in the bank. And what was your burn rate? Oh, it was more than that. So we're talking like less. than a month of cash. Can't sleep. Yeah, horrible. Like, I would go home to my wife, Alon, who, you know, and she would, I would just be like,

I don't think this is going to work. Like, I feel like we're this close. We're so close, but I just don't think I can go back to investors with the data that I have right now and get another round done. We hadn't proven enough. And this is still kind of, this is 2015 time frame. So this is like a year into our launch and we're really struggling. And we hadn't defined that.

engine of growth. Yeah, we were very close. So you have so many times this happens to companies near death and they have to go back with their tail between their legs to people who have given them money. People ponied up again in you. What was it about you that they saw that said, I believe in you? And what's your best piece of advice, one single piece, that all the entrepreneurs out there facing a similar cash crunch today can't sleep may not work? What would you tell them? I mean, it's the toughest, those are the toughest days, you know, on the journey. And I would just say you just have to stay resilient and stay strong. And it's just like in modeling, you show up to 100 castings and you get one job or in sales.

You make 500 calls and you book one sale. Raising money is a lot like that. It's a game of numbers. You've got to put yourself out there. You've got to meet a lot of people and you just got to stay positive and stay resilient. Ultimately for us, the traction, the little traction we got, we were able to get a few investors to believe in the story and ultimately believe in us. and write another small check. How small?

So when all set and done over the first two years of the business, we raised $2.5 million. So the first tranche was about $800. That was whittled down to zero. And then we raised another, what is it, 1.8. And the beautiful thing about our journey is that after that 1.8, we never needed to raise another dollar on the balance. sheet. What was your valuation when you took money for the first time? Well, the first money in

was a convertible note and that that converted at a $5 million valuation. So when we had raised $2.5 million at a $4 million pre, you know, you do the math. We gave away a significant amount of our company for $2.5 million. Those people that are very happy. I hope they're sending you and your wife and family on first class vacations. The beauty of it is that a lot of those people were my friends and, you know, nobody else, you know, nobody believed that I was a guy that could do this. I didn't have a track record in a peril. And so the people that gave me money were people that they knew me, you know, they knew that I was devoted, that I was, they knew my character, and ultimately they believed, well, somebody's going to do this. So here's a little money. Some of

my friends wrote $10,000 checks, $5,000 checks. I would take any size and just to see how this has changed their lives has ultimately been one of the most rewarding parts about this journey for me. So things started taking off 2018. You hit $30 million in revenue. And it's so great when things like that happen because now everyone's showing up at your door, right? So you had Northwest show up with $45 million check. You had SoftBank Vision 2 Fund show up with a $400 million check. And then GA showed up with a rumored $700 million check. So he raised over a billion dollars today. How amazing does that feel? It's over a billion dollars.

That's all 100% of it has been returned to our shareholders. The company didn't put a dollar on the balance sheet to grow. So they bought out existing investors? Yeah. So, but do people still hold some shares in those first rounds? They're like, hey, man. No, yeah. Everybody typically sold their pro rata share.

So, you know, we sold, you know, all said and done. What is it, about 40% of the company. So shareholders sold about 40% of their shares. So there's a lot of them are still. holding on and invest in general Atlantic though invested 825 million dollars so you're saying that 825 went to existing shareholders yeah so are your shareholders now buying private jets and going and buying 20,000 square foot homes you know I don't know what uh what they're doing with the money but but you know we've been so incredibly blessed with great investors that have been

patient and supportive always lending a helping hand wherever they can so very well deserving of all the abundance. You see this today in the VC world in the investment space, people raising these massive rounds of funding. There are companies, I mean, we could talk about we work, but we don't need to because everyone knows the story, but Smile. Direct Club raised, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars. They went BK. How do you stay scrappy when you've raised over a billion dollars or are very profitable today? I mean, we're sitting here at 550 employees where you are today. How do you stay scrappy? And then how do you keep the culture? you're growing this big. Yeah, I mean, I think that sometimes too much money creates bad habits.

We were fortunate that, again, the money never went to the company's balance sheet. I think if we were sitting on $800 million of cash on our balance sheet, it would be really hard to not go out and make bad mistakes. You would go out and sign the wrong athletes. You would go out and activate events. You would go out and hire too many people. You'd go and build too much overhead. You'd create bad habits. We were fortunate in the sense that this company always grew off of its own cash flow. So we never developed bad habits. We always stayed a bit scrappy. You know, we never spent out ahead of our growth, which, you know, sometimes there's a trade-off there because you have to live through some growing pains, which we have definitely done.

And that puts pressure on the team. But ultimately, I'd like to believe that everybody here is in this for the right reason. Viori has been wildly successful. It's definitely changed the the course of my life and my family's life. But ultimately, I never, I never got into this. You got to remember, I left a stable job. I told my parents, I'm leaving this company that I built. And I'm going to go out and start my third apparel company after two had crashed and burned. And I'm going to put my life savings into another one. My parents thought I was insane. A lot of people did. My vision was to build something that had real depth and meaning, that would do something really positive for our community that would inspire people to live their lives with positivity,

to move their bodies, to feel their best on the journey of life. That ethos and the spirit of our brand is still with us today. It was never about just getting rich. This business was always had a deeper calling to it. And that's still very much omnipresent today. I mean, I don't have to work here, but I love it. I love building product every season. I love telling positive stories. I love building an incredible culture and watching other people thrive around me. So it's like I just genuinely believe that we are called here for a deeper purpose. And that's the motivating energy that propels us forward. When investors invest in a company, they want an exit and return on their capital. You're rumored to have a billion dollars revenue today. You're a private company, so that's not

public. Are there plans to go public? And what's the time frame there? Yeah, so we're not on a timeline there. It's definitely one of many outcomes. To your point, we've raised money. So we have a fiduciary responsibility. And, you know, it's like having a third child, Viore. And, you know, my wife and I talk about it all the time. It's like, Viore is like our third baby. And we want what's, we want to see its reach its full potential and grow. And I think that we might have a bigger opportunity to do that in the public markets than the private markets. So it's definitely something that is of interest. But we have patient investors. Everybody is here because they believe in the long term. They believe that we are going to build something of significance on a global scale. And so, yeah, for me,

whether we do that in the private markets or the public markets, I don't have a strong preference. I just want to see Viori reach its full potential. We talked briefly before we got on air here and before we got on the show today. Going public has downsides too, and I want to talk about two of those downsides. The first is, I'll give you a story about our company that went public. So we had a tech company in late 90s, and we were revolutionizing the way to serve web traffic. And we filed, this is crazy, we filed our S-1 14 months after we incorporated the company. On $3.2 million of revenue, Apple was 90% of the business. We're the most oversubscribed IPO in Morgan Stanley history at that point.

Only one more was Cisco. So when you file your documents to go public, people don't know. You file it months before. SEC reviews the documents. They come back with comments. But it has everybody's shareholdings in that company. I'm driving from O'Hare to Chicago.

I have a law board meeting. Ex-wife is with me. We were in a cab. No Uber back then. I get a call from this broker of Bear Stearns named David Pollack. And suddenly David is, and who I like a lot. Hi, David, if you're listening, I still love you. But this was crazy.

And I don't think I've ever shared this with you before, how crazy I thought this was. He said, hey, Randy, congratulations. And I said, what are you talking about? I didn't even know. I'd left the company. So I didn't even know they had filed the S-1 that day. I knew it was coming. And so he said, yeah, you know, congratulations.

And you own, I don't know what it was, 3 million shares of stock. I was taken aback by how intrusive it was. Then we went public. And I think our last round valuation, Joe, before I went public, we had Apple. We had battery series A. And by the way, there was no seed back then or pre-suit. It was A, B, C, and D. And so battery was our first.

They invested $8.25 million at $12.95 million. And we had a Wall Street firm called Baker Capital, put in $35 million. Apple, after Steve Jobs tried to buy the company, we were helping them serve quick time downloads, try to buy the company, we said no. They put in $25 million at a $250 million valuation that we thought we would never need. And Microsoft did a $1.2, Cisco at a $1.5 billion valuation. That was unheard of back then, a unicorn private company. When the stock went public, on October 29, 1999, our company was worth $14.4 billion. And ultimately, 483 days or something like that, in public, our stock hit evaluation of $35 billion, which at the time was more than the value

of Chrysler Ford and GM combined. And I'm from Detroit. So it was kind of a big thing. Then the company goes public and all everybody wants to talk about is my net worth. By the way, it's paper net worth. And as you know, the only thing that matters is cash in the bank accounting entry, right? You can't live on paper and we couldn't sell things. But there's so much press and everyone want to talk how wealthy I was on paper. It was highly uncomfortable. It's intrusive. Yeah. So that's likely the outcome that you're going to have, right? Access public markets, you fuel your growth that will go into the company. Are you prepared for all of that scrutiny? Because everyone's going to know at the end of the day that's going to make you uncomfortable to say,

but you're a billionaire. If you're not today, you're going to be. Definitely intrusive. And, and, you know, that is something my wife grew up in South Lake Tahoe. with a single mom. I grew up, as we've talked about, without a lot of money in the household. This whole thing has been a big adjustment for our family. And we are a type of family that are pretty private. And we want our kids to grow up with a lot of the same type of values that we grew up with. And so, yeah, that's a reality that I probably won't fully come to terms with until it happens. It's tough. But it's something that I am, yeah, I'm conscious of and it's going to be an adjustment. People treat you very differently. I hope you're enjoying this video so far,

but before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lift and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than $15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage in my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving

our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan again.

all right now let's get back to the video you're a lot more well known than I was at the time but I remember we had interesting investors in the first round angel investors and I'm not going to mention who they are because people will figure out who I'm talking about right now so I remember going a restaurant in Brentwood tuscana and I remember sitting there and I was with a couple of our investors a company had gone public and I think a hundred thousand dollar investment at the time at one point it was worth $80 million with something crazy. And I'm sure your people as well are, you know, sitting on $10 billion. I don't think that quite, not quite that type of return.

You couldn't sell. So it's like, you know, and you never know where people thought. Everyone loves to count everyone's money. But as my mom said, you should never count anyone's money. You never know what the real story is. So this famous movie producer comes over to her table. Randy, hey, how are you? I've heard so much about you.

We'd love to have lunch one day. And I said, okay, we'll call him Steve. that's actually his name and in aspen two years later we're rolling into the st. Regis we're getting out we're checking in and there's Steve and so I get out of the car and our stock at that point was in worth 53 cents a share one from 345 a share to 53 cents a share you don't feel so good by it when your stock price loses 99.8% of its value and Steve looks at me to Randy Kaplan looks at me do I know you yeah and it was emblematic of a lot of the relationships I have that everyone loves a a winner. People don't really like you when at a different situation. I think that's important

to remember that like all the praise and acknowledgement, it's not for you. It's for the job. You know, like I am consciously aware of that. And I think it's part of why like I try to keep my head down and I don't say yes to a lot of invitations. You know, I tend to like to be here with my team building the company. I like, I think that's where I add the most value to this process. It's not out in the public getting accolades or, you know, hobnobbing with, you know, celebrities or whatnot. Like, I'm in this because I like to build, you know? Like, I really genuinely enjoy building product. And that's what keeps me showing up every day. Let's talk about your biggest competitor, for lack of a better word, Lulu Lemon. So Lulu Lemon goes public. And when they went

public, they had a $1.24 billion valuation. Their peak over $50 billion. The stock has lost, I think, of today, 53% from its high. Valuation today, I think, is $26 billion. Their CEO, with high profile, went through some personal issues where he essentially was forced to resign. He's now executive chairman of the company. Do you worry about going public? And if you miss projections by a penny, your stock could fall.

I mean, your company could lose billions of dollars in value. That is one of the downsides, right? You keep having to make people happy. Yeah, of course. I mean, those are the realities of being. a public company. As a company that has a very long-term vision and orientation to how we build, those are definitely things that we're cognizant of. So we hope that we'll put structures in place that will protect us from having to think to short-term, but also, you know, we want to do

right by the investors that join us on this journey. So it's a balance, you know, and we're going to have to tow that line. Let's talk about some of the things as we wind down today. And again, I appreciate you being here, appreciate your time. I want to talk about some of the things that makes us successful. You were an outsider in a business and I've said before you knew almost nothing about it. Your naivity was one of the best ingredients of your success. How can that be? I just think that we sometimes, the experience that gives us confidence to do things can also be very limiting in the way that we think. I interviewed a lot of people in the early days that had great experience, whether they were in merchandising or sales or marketing. What I realized is that they

were really good at understanding one, like, small corner of the page, but there was a lot more information and a lot more things to consider on that page than that corner that they were experts in. And sometimes being such an expert and knowing how to do an amazing job as a director of marketing or whatever the job was, a director of sales, you actually, in an entrepreneurial environment, I only need you to do the 20% of that job that adds the most value, and I need you to spend your energy across a lot of other aspects of the business as well. But it was so deeply ingrained to want to do that small part of the job really, really well. It's hard to articulate, but in the early days of a company, you need people that are very diversified across. They're like

rovers. They can do a lot of things and a lot of things well. But you may not need to do the full a plus job in this and the full A plus job in this because you don't have the balance sheet to support that. And you also sometimes are like limited by your experience and you don't think maybe differently. Our category, for example, when we entered wholesale accounts would say you can't sell that short for that price and it doesn't fit into activeware and it doesn't fit into sportswear. Therefore, there's no opportunity. But we said to ourselves now like this is the way people are living their lives. You guys are just, you, you guys are dated in your thinking and you need to catch up with where the market's going. So by holding a vision, it challenged everybody to think differently about our category. And so, again, too much experience. You can be blinded and limited by that experience. Sometimes ignorance is the best path because you just jump in with two feet and you learn as things are being thrown at you. One of the most important qualities of my own success is somebody called extreme preparation. That's preparing more than anyone else for any podcast, any interview, any meeting, and it works.

99.99% rate, you can take something that has almost zero chance of success and put it in the high 90s category. Can you give some examples of how extreme preparation has led to your success? You know, I think that clarity on your strategic plan is something that is so incredibly important, especially as you go from a company in a garage with, you know, a handful of employees to, you know, hundreds of employees and you have departments, a marketing department of 100 people, a product department of 100 people. Building alignment between your channel, your product teams, your marketing teams is something that requires a lot of intense focus and preparation to build clarity.

So everybody understands what the priorities and the objectives are and what not to do, what to say no to. Because there's so much opportunity that if we tried to chase down every opportunity, we wouldn't get anything done. And so learning what to say no to is something that I didn't fully appreciate in the early days of Viori, but as we've grown, I've developed a really intense appreciation for. And it all comes down to planning and communication and alignment ahead of what you're going to do when you go to market. On a scale of one to a hundred, how important is work ethic to our success? A hundred. Give us an example of you may be staying up pulling an all-nighter

before some important meeting? I think, you know, I can't speak to other entrepreneurs because I can't live within their bodies and understand what's in their minds, but I can speak to what was true for me. And that was that the idea of work-life balance on the path of entrepreneurship or building a great career,

really building anything of significance, my belief is that it's not a nine-to-five job. It's something where if you believe in the power of manifestation, you have to feel it at a gut level. And that means you are obsessing on it, you are thinking about it, you are manifesting it into existence. And that doesn't come from a balanced approach.

It comes from an obsession and a passion. And that translates to hard work. But like I don't even think of it as hard work because it's like, what else would you be doing? You're willing something into existence. it's like it's not work it's a it's an extension of how you feel about something does that make sense yeah you've mentioned that suffering is related to your success so tell us about the viore name where it comes from and then maybe your experience climbing the seven tallest peaks and what

it's really like at two in the morning when you're freezing your ass off a group of friends and I decided we were going to climb all the 14,000 foot peaks in California and there's 12 of them in the early days when before viori was born we were in this process so we were every summer we would do one or two of these climbs the process for me was quite it was a suffer fest you know you know your feet had blisters you're carrying this horrible pack on your back it's heavy your back aches you sleep up at like usually around 12,000 feet which is really high when you're coming from sea level so I would always have these intense headaches I wouldn't sleep you'd be freezing cold at night because you're up at high

elevation, even in the summer, then you're waking up at two, three in the morning with headlamps and you're beginning the ascent up to the top so that you can summit and get back down to camp in the afternoon. It was always a suffer fest for me. Some people just get incredible joy. They deal with altitude. But for me, it was incredibly difficult. But man, when I got to the top of that mountain, it was just like something would come over me. And I'd be looking out at this incredible view. And I remember almost every time that I get up, like, I would have just this like little tear, you know, just like a little tear that would come from my eye. And it wasn't a tear of sadness. It was a tear of like just pure inspiration of like pride that that I

overcame, that the human spirit had the power and the will to take that next step when I was just in so much pain. And so getting to the top, it was just so symbolic of life's journey, you know? And that we all are faced with these obstacles, every single one of us. And we all have our different stories. But man, when you rise and you keep taking that next step, we have the potential to unlock so much inspiration within us. And that is just the most beautiful thing in the world when we connect with that, what we're truly capable of. And so Viori means mountain in Finnish. And the rise of the shine is really all about the journey of life. It's about climbing that mountain. And we all have our own mountains. We're climbing different things. But life is so beautiful when we really

truly shine from within because we recognize what we're really capable of as humans. As I was sitting in your lobby before we started the show a half hour before, I always get to where I'm going one hour to 30 minutes before I study for my show as I'm in there going over my 10th hour, 14th hour of preparation with my amazing producer, Natasha, who does an amazing job with my show, I noticed everyone walking in today. Today, I guess, is dog day. Bring your dog to work day. And I always notice, I like looking at the culture firms. And I see everyone walking in. They had a good bounce on their step. No one was dragging their feet. I didn't see anybody, oh God, I'm coming to work today. Everyone looked positive attitude. When people talk about success

of a business, I think culture is very, usually not one of the things that they mention the most, but here is everything. Our three values are to make great products, to be in great relationships, and that starts with our relationships with ourselves, but extends out to each other, our customers, and to live extraordinary lives. And that means different things to different people.

We all express ourselves differently. I have always believed that great companies are just great people, you know, that are aligned by a common vision and they work together harmoniously. But, like, at the end of the day, we're in the people business, you know? We make stuff, but like,

your culture is your superpower. And if you have, to your point, people that are coming to work unhappy, people are going to feel that out in the world when they interact with Fiore's clothes. But when you have a company that's working together harmoniously and people are aligned by the vision and they're treated well and they're bought in, they're doing something that's bigger than a simple job, it creates an incredible energy within an organization. And I genuinely believe that the customer who's buying our product on the rack at Nordstrom or REI or shopping in one of our stores, they feel that energy. They feel the harmony in the organization. It translates out to every touch point. And so we always want to build this company from the inside out. It's not just a

bunch of sizzle and no stake. It's about the stake. It's about the heart of the business. That's the people and that's the product. It's how we work together here within our four walls. You hire people for fit and not resume. What does that really mean? If you have kind of a shitty resume, but they really like you here, are you going to hire that person? What is the weighted average of both of those? I don't know where that came from, but we are, we, we balance both. Experience is, is incredibly important as is culture fit. You have a no meeting at lunchtime rule, which is awesome. I eat through my lunch every day.

It takes me six minutes, Joe and the juice sandwich. You usually get some sushi next door, and I'm jamming. I'll check ESPN news. In 10 minutes, I'm back at work. I think it's a brilliant idea. It gives people the opportunity

to kind of decompress and then come back fresh. Is that the idea? Yeah, we call it our investment in happiness hour, and it's just we encourage our leaders to not schedule meetings over lunch. We developed a firm policy that there were to be no meetings at lunch because we recognize people need a break. And, you know, people break those rules at times. We're all human. Sometimes people just want to get the work done. My experience is that when I take a moment to go

take a walk, get some fresh air, take a break, I'm so much more productive that afternoon than and when I just push through. We try to encourage our people to just, like, within the craziness and the busyness, like, this is not an easy culture. It's not. We're building something of significance. We're building a global business. It's hard.

We're putting a lot of new process in, new people coming into the organization. We're changing how we work all the time. It's not easy. So what I can't offer people is just a place that's going to not change. challenge them because it is going to be challenging. But within that, we try to make sure that the people here are genuinely kind, they care for the people that they work with, that we have a good culture, a good place of how, like how we do the work together. We try to approach it with positivity and kindness. And so while it may not always be easy, we try to create an

environment where people can thrive within it. Your marketing strategy has changed all time. You now have ambassadors like the Gerber family, so Cindy Crawford, Randy, Kaya, your launch to the Kaya collection, I think, today, which looks very cool. I just saw some things outside in the hallway. Charlie showed me around, which was awesome. Arch Manning, Livy Dunn, Colson Loveland. Jack Draper playing in the U.S. Open? There you go.

Jack Draper, I heard that as well. It's a big one. So who's next? And our celebrities really worth what you're paying them to promote? at your brand. There's a lot of CEOs and companies who at the end of the day you talk to and say, gosh, you know, that's really a waste of money. Yeah, I think in the early days,

our philosophy was that we didn't need partners of global significance and notoriety to build the brand. But, you know, the company is big now. We're opening stores in Korea and China and the UK,

you know, the Far East. Like, the business is growing and it's global. And so we don't have the benefit of having the same grassroots strategies, boots on the ground in these distant lands as we did when we were building the business from the inside out here in Encinitas. And so we just have to think about how we build awareness on a global scale. So that looks a little bit differently than it did in the early days of building the brand. I think what's really important when you work with partners is that there's a genuine love for what you do. So that's

number one, like there has to be an authentic connection because if it's authentic and it's real, the partnership will thrive. If it's forced and you're just paying somebody to try to endorse your brand or product, people sniff out the inauthenticity. So there has to be values alignment. And if you start there, we tend to see great results. How are you using AI in your business? And are you experiencing what I read about, what we read about now every day that AI is, replacing humans in their jobs? We are not seeing that. As a matter of fact, we plan over the next five years to hire more people per year than we've

hired any year in our company's history. So we plan to continue to bring a lot of talented people into our organization. But our hope is that AI will make our people more effective and efficient. And so people's work is more meaningful. They'll have more time to think, more space to be creative, and less time. you know, hitting keys on keyboards. With all of your success and the money that you've made, have you done something very special with a family, a trip?

Have you bought yourself something that you said to yourself when you're in the quiet moment saying, oh my gosh, look at what I built. I want to buy myself something special? You know, my wife and I have, you know, we bought a place in Lake Tahoe where we love to spend time and it really is a grounding place for our family. know if when things get crazy and I'm traveling and you know I've been away from the kids like we go

to Tahoe and that's like our place to re-center and so that's been really powerful for us and we're so grateful to be able to retreat and to go there but some of the biggest joys for me you know I bought my mom a house the best yeah you know that was a really special moment for me my sister who is carrying on my dad's work she's a naturopelic doctor and an acupuncturist I've been able to to help her out a lot I bought her a house my dad passed away, but before he was dying, you know, he always dreamed of living by the water. And so I bought him a house on Vashon Island where I was born. And then ultimately, my sister, I gave that house to my sister when he passed.

I think one of the things that, you know, people talk a lot about philanthropy. I really believe in philanthropy starting really close to home. Are the people that are washing your clothes? Are they thriving, you know? So our cleaning lady who's been with us forever, she's become a part of our family. Our kids love her like family. She was having car trouble. So we bought her a new car.

Like being able to like give back to the people that are closest to us and making sure that the, you know, my mother-in-law is thriving. My mom, my sister, making sure that the nucleus is thriving. So we spend a lot of time focusing there first and then building out from there. When I made money, my grandmother, who was my hero, she lived until she was 104, raised in foster care, slept in closets, was the maid essentially back in the day. The families took them in just to make money, and I did well financially, and then I supported her for the rest of her life for 30 years, paid her rent, bought her a car, and I said, Dan, I'm going to buy you whatever car you want. You just tell me, you know, you go to the dealership, you give me a call, I'll wire the money, you have to hit me before I want, a car. clock in California. That's the wire caught off. So she calls me a few months later. I said,

Randy, I got the car. I'm so excited and said, okay, and I'm waiting for the Mercedes dealership. I said, Nana, where are you? He said, I'm at the Toyota dealership. And I said, what? What car did you guys? Said, got a Camry. I said, and you know, she grew up in the day where long distance phone bill is like one minute a call and you'd call her and it'd be like rushing off the phone so that that was just her and you know she never had a Mercedes and you know she had a nice place which I paid for but so I borrow the Camry and I go to Detroit that's somewhere to visit I'm from Detroit and she's excited to show me the car and she sent me this picture of this red camry and she's going like this in front of the car so I'm excited she's like Randy let me take it

for a drive it's a 90 degree humid day we get inside the car and it's like worse than the sauna and I go to lower the window and there's no button there's a crank And I said, hey, Nana, what's up with what's up with it? He said, well, I said, and I said, what's up with the cloth seats? They said, well, the seats were $600 more. And the windows were $1,100 more. And I said, oh, Nana, like, we're beyond that at this point. And that was the first of four Camrys that I bought her.

But it's such a joy when you can take care of your family and do nice things for your family. You mentioned philanthropy, which is also important. Not only when you make money, can you make, different. By the way, we had a woman who took care of us when we were young kids to Cleo, who was with our family for 50 years. When I made money, she had been retired and was old, so I sent her family some money as well, which it's always nice when you call someone who has done amazing things for you and they don't expect it coming and they're blown away, but it feels way more to give than to get. But when you make money, you also can give away money,

but you can influence people to give away money. So talk about the Rob Marchado Foundation and what you're doing here at Viori and then personally to help other people. Rob's foundation is very separate. We've done a lot to support Rob, but they're putting clean water drinking stations in public schools across San Diego.

And so we've helped Rob with that foundation and done our part. But I think beyond that, Viori has always looked for opportunities to give back to the community. And so sometimes that, That's a not-for-profit that has a really cool mission. Like the partner that we're working with right now is called Foster the Earth.

And they take foster kids and they give them opportunities to connect to nature. So every month they go on a hike together. And then at the end of the year, they take all these foster kids and they go on a huge, like they'll go climb a mountain. You know, and that's very important. It's very connected to my story and my journey. But they'll go and like climb Mount Whitney, for example. And these experiences are transformational for these kids. And these are foster kids who grew up in the system without, you know, parents.

And so we're doing a lot to support that organization right now. And we really believe in their mission. We like opportunities where we can be experientially involved in our giving. As a company, you know, we'll have volunteers that will go out and be a part of that experience. We also love connecting people with the ocean. That's, you know, our natural playground at Viori is like the Pacific Ocean to the high sierras. And that informs and inspires a lot of the products we make. And so that's our playground.

And that's where we also want to give back is helping underprivileged youth connect to experiences connecting to the mountains, to the sea. So creating environments for people to go surfing. We'll leverage our ambassadors and we'll partner with organizations that are out there providing those opportunities for kids that would never go to the beach. And then the last pillar, which hasn't come to life fully yet, will be around sport and providing opportunities for kids to play sports. And that's very much like the spirit of the Viori brand.

It's about sport. It's about connection to nature, connection to community. And, you know, my mom always says, like, that money is a lot like energy and you don't ever want stagnant energy. And so she talks about completing the circle where, you know, when you receive a lot, you don't want to just like bottle that energy up

and just be where it stops. giving back and completing that circle of life is so important to like really thrive with your personal health, your spirituality. And so that's something that I'm trying to to really incorporate into our lives, not only as a company, but also as a family. One really cool thing that the company did is in the fires in Los Angeles, you gave a 40% discount to all people who were affected by the fires, which was really incredible. Well, we took beyond that, we, we took, all of our stores in L.A., which I think we have five of them, and every store became a giving outpost. And so we sent all of our inventory from our distribution center, anything

excess that we could part ways with. We brought it to our stores, and we invited the community down, and anybody that was impacted by the fires could come down and just pick out a new outfit. Yeah. I mean, I went into the Century City Mall to buy some clothes because we had to get out of our house. My daughter's school burned down and thankfully they're they're all set but I didn't feel comfortable taking the 40% discount because there were people who needed it more than I did. But I thought that was really, really cool. So thank you for doing all that. Yeah. Oh yeah. It was our pleasure. It was such a tragic moment for everybody's lives down here in Southern California. Yeah. All right. We're at the end of the show. I always conclude my show with a game called fill

no blank to excellence. Are you ready to play? Let's go. If I hadn't met that woman at the party that night, I would be potentially still in a really challenging relationship and in a career where I wasn't super inspired showing up every day. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is surround yourself with great people. You are the company that you keep. My number one professional goal is to change the world. My number one personal goal is to be a great dad. My biggest regret is no regrets. My biggest fear is waking up on my deathbed realizing I didn't take that step towards something that I was really in my heart. The craziest moment that's ever happened in my career is probably getting invited to go and work as a model. The funniest thing that's ever happened in my

career is? It's probably raising money from Google Ventures and then giving it back to them. You got to talk about that for just at least 60 seconds. A friend of mine, was married to a guy named Bill Maris who started Google Ventures. Bill's great. You know Bill? Yeah, I mean a little bit. Yeah. When we were starting out on the journey, we couldn't raise money, was really, really tough. Bill, almost as I think philanthropy and because he was getting married to a friend of mine, decided they were going to write a check. But it came with some, it came with some caveats. Like, they would put so much money in, but in order to get the second tranche, we had to raise so much from outside

investors. We got the first tranche, but we were having a really hard time getting to the other amount. And we had another investor that wanted to come in. And there was a conflict of interest between Google Ventures and this new investor. But this new investor wanted to write a bigger check. And so ultimately, we went to Bill. And Bill was like a friend. And he wasn't super emotional about the investment. He was almost doing it. I think more is a favor to us. And so Bill just said, look, if you want to take this other money, we're happy to unwind our investment, just pay us back and we'll tear up the legal documents. And so ultimately, that's what we did. I can't remember who introduced us, but it was, I think, this woman, I had a friend who was friends with his wife.

And I think, did they get married? Because that was my intro. We had a few phone calls, but we've never met in person. He's a great guy. And now he's an investor in Viori. After all that, he's come back in individually. I love it. The best advice I've ever received is, I would say get a mentor, listen to your mentor, but ultimately at the end of the day, trust your own instincts because nobody knows your business quite like you do. I cut out a question, but now I'm going to put it back in. I think mentorship is one of the most important things that any hungry, motivated person can find. You have to earn mentorship. You just can't send someone a LinkedIn message and say, hey, I mean, I get these all the time. I'm sure you do as well. And no, you got to earn it.

You got to do something valuable. You got to show that you're coachable. How does a random person today get Joe Kula to be their mentor? It breaks my heart that it's probably very difficult because I'm raising young children and I just, with the limited amount of time that I have, I want to be there for my kids. And so it's hard. But I love the idea of mentorship. And so what I would just say is like it can't be a formal ask to be a mentor but I'm always up for a phone call and if it organically turns into something where I can be a value then it that's what it turns into I have a professional coaching business now which is taking up more and more of my time I mean it used to be free by the way but I work 70 hours a week and I've changed lives and I have a coach

I pay for the coach when you have a coach and by the way all my guests nearly have coaches you have a professional coach helping you in your business I have had a number of coaches at different stages in my life. Right. And so, you know, my joy is not only do I get to make a decent amount of money, it's very expensive, but the results are very good, but I get to also pursue my passion. Yeah. Which is changing lives and helping people, which is, which is the goal of this show, by the way. So 10 years from now, I'm going to be doing. Hopefully this. And 20 years from now, I'm going to be doing. Hopefully coaching and mentoring and giving back. If you were President Trump today, the next thing that you would do is, I don't know, I think he's working hard on solving all

these different conflicts that we've got going on. I would stay focused on that. If you could be one person in the world today who's alive, it would be, I would love to sit down with Warren Buffett. I'm a huge fan of cold calling. And my guess is that you would have some decent probability of success to call Warren Buffett and say, I'm a great entrepreneur. I built this company from scratch. It's worth rumored to be $8 billion today. I bet he meets with you. Yeah. I would love to meet him. I would also love to meet Phil Knight and I would love to meet Richard Bronson. So Richard Branson takes people to Necker Island and I hear that you certainly know the right people to get the invite there. Yeah. And I've heard people go down there crazy stories. Yeah.

Him hanging, taking you around all kinds of cool things. Yeah. Have you tried to meet Phil Knight before? I was at a golf course once and he was walking around the golf course and I walked past him. And the kind of the rule of the club is that you don't kind of solicit people. So I was sensitive to like just, you know, say something to him. But I regret it because looking back, I should have asked him if he had a few minutes. We don't have to talk about where it was, but was it one of Mike Meldman's properties? Yeah, it was. Yeah.

I mean, so Mike Meldman was on the show, Discovery Land Company. If you haven't watched that episode, you got to watch it. And it's interesting because there are a lot of people. We have a home. And Cordillane, as you know, we talked about this, Gaza Ranch. And I've said it on my show before, so I don't mind talking about it. But there are just so many interesting people going around there. Tony Robbins was on my show, which is my dream hero.

He's another one I would love to meet. When I started my show four years ago, he was my number one guest. I read a book in college. He changed my life. So many people said, oh, I'll introduce to Tony. And by the way, I paid $25,000 for this mastermind so I could shake his hand. And then Doug Evans, who was also on my show, amazing friend. Thank you, Doug, great episode as well, said, I know Tony, I'll introduce you.

Tony left me this amazing voicemail that night, voice memo, and then invited me down to do a show at his house in Palm Beach, which is a thrill of a lifetime. And I'm going to his four-day seminar, unleash the power within, which I hear his life. I mean, four days, I don't know, I mean, no phone, ADD, I'm not sure I can really. Oh, you're going to love it. Can't really do it. You're going to love it. He's just, he's, he's the best. Yeah.

And I'm going to see, whether I got hooked that up for you or not. Awesome. He's incredible. Awesome. He came to Gaza once, and I'll just share the story. So it was the summer before last, and we were at the clubhouse. And my wife said, Tony Robbins behind, and he'll fly in for one or two days, and that's it. And he's gone.

He was behind us, but I didn't turn around. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to get to him. I'm going to give myself 15 minutes, and then I'm going to go up. I'm going to go to the bathroom, I'll walk up to the table, and I'm going to introduce myself. And when that 15 minutes was up, he was gone. So I had the chance. Yeah. If you were on your deathbed today and you had two minutes to live and your wife and kids were with you, what would you tell them?

I would probably tell them that nothing that I accomplished in my life would have been possible without them. and that I'm proud of them. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time, but haven't, is skydiving. I'll share a skydiving story as well, and then that'll be the last. I have one more question, and then we're done. I went to a bachelor party before my first marriage. Everyone went skydive into Vegas, and my wife to be would let me go because she didn't want me to die or break a leg.

And so my son, Charlie, who is now 21, he had an incentive to do something for him to go skydiving and I would pay for it. So he did. He went skydiving. How old was he at the time? He was last year, it was 20. 20, yeah. So he just said, you know, you get the video and all that. And you see the plane going up and it's so rickety. It looks like it has holes in the side of the plane and it can hardly get up in the air.

and you always read about once a year a skydiving plane goes down and there's something happening. But that's on my list. I'm terrified of heights. Yeah. Last question. The one question that you wish I'd asked, but didn't, is honestly, I feel like you have been so thorough, the most prepared man in the business. There's nothing that you didn't ask me that I can think of.

I think this is, it was awesome talking to you. Thank you. Likewise. I'm excited to get to know you better. Yeah. We're going to be neighbors at some point in the future. We have kids the same age. Absolutely.

We'll be hanging. I hope our kids are going to be lifelong friends. Oh, yeah. No, it'll be so fun. If we can see each other down there, that would be really cool. All right, awesome. Really appreciate you. Thank you for you.

Congratulations on all your amazing success. Thank you. Really appreciate it. I don't know.