Daymond John

Daymond John grew up in Hollis, Queens, and started working at 10, after his parents divorced, handing out flyers for $2 an hour. His mother taught him to sew, and in 1992 he turned that skill into 90 handmade wool ski hats, sold out of his mother's house on Jamaica Avenue for $10 apiece, $800 in a single day and the beginning of FUBU. He is dyslexic, something he did not discuss publicly for years, and built the company's early marketing the same improvised way he built the hats: loaning free hockey jerseys to rappers for music videos, betting that hip-hop's audience would buy what its stars wore on camera.

FUBU, 'For Us, By Us,' got its real break at a 1994 Las Vegas trade show, where retailers placed $300,000 in orders John had no way to fill. He and his mother took a second mortgage on her house to raise production money, were turned down by roughly two dozen banks, and finally financed the run with a New York Times ad that landed them a manufacturing partnership with Samsung. LL Cool J wearing FUBU gear in a Gap commercial, and dozens more hip-hop placements through the 1990s, turned the label into a nine-figure business; total sales have since passed $6 billion, and a FUBU jacket now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. John joined Shark Tank as an investor in 2009.

John gambled his mother's house on a company that, at the time he mortgaged it, had no confirmed way to fill the orders it had already taken, a bet that could have cost her the roof over her head if the Samsung partnership had not come through in time. He has said publicly that he stayed less present in his first marriage than the job demanded, telling interviewers his then-wife 'literally saw me on TV more than she saw me in person.' In April 2017, at the height of his Shark Tank visibility, he was diagnosed with stage II thyroid cancer, had it surgically removed, and has spoken about the diagnosis since as a turning point that pushed him toward financial-literacy advocacy over pure brand-building.

John has spent the years since building institutions around the FUBU story rather than repeating it: The Shark Group, his brand-management firm; Daymond John's Success Formula, later rebranded Next Level Success, an entrepreneurship-education venture; and Black Entrepreneurs Day, launched at Harlem's Apollo Theater in 2020. The federal government named him a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015. FUBU itself, born as a bet on hip-hop's buying power in a Queens living room, is now taught in business schools as an early case study in what marketing people later started calling 'authentic' branding, a term FUBU was practicing before it had a name.

Daymond John's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• FUBU company
  'For Us, By Us' — grew into a $6 billion apparel brand 1992
• The Shark Group company
  Brand-management and marketing consultancy 2009
• Shark Tank television
  Joined as an investor 2009
• Black Entrepreneurs Day other
  Annual event launched at Harlem's Apollo Theater 2020

• February 23, 1969 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 1992 aged ~23 Sells the first FUBU ski hats out of his mother's house
• 1994 aged ~25 Takes $300,000 in orders at a Las Vegas trade show he can't yet fill
• 1995 aged ~26 Signs a manufacturing partnership with Samsung after a New York Times ad
• 2009 aged ~40 Joins Shark Tank as an investor
• 2015 aged ~46 Named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship
• April 2017 aged 48 Diagnosed with and treated for stage II thyroid cancer
• 2020 aged ~51 Launches Black Entrepreneurs Day at the Apollo Theater

• Kevin O'Leary b. 1954
  Canadian-American businessman and Shark Tank investor known as Mr. Wonderful. Shark Tank co-star
• Barbara Corcoran b. 1949
  Real estate entrepreneur who turned a $1,000 loan into a billion-dollar brokerage. Shark Tank co-star
• Jay-Z b. 1969
  Rapper and entrepreneur whose career helped move hip-hop from a subculture to the center of American business and culture. hip-hop business parallel
• Sara Blakely b. 1971
  Founder of Spanx who became the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. fellow self-made entrepreneur