Daymond John

Daymond John built FUBU from his mother's house in Hollis, Queens, into a brand that has generated more than six billion dollars in global sales, and the useful part of that story for a business audience is the first eight hundred dollars.

That was the take from a single day in 1992 selling handmade hats on a street corner, and it is the founding fact of The Power of Broke, his 2016 New York Times bestseller: that having no money forces the creativity, hustle and resourcefulness that having money lets a business skip, and that most of what he did right at FUBU he did because he could not afford the alternative. Rise and Grind followed in 2018, also a New York Times bestseller, on the working habits of people who succeed, and Little Daymond Learns to Earn in 2023 took the subject to children.

He has been a Shark on ABC's Shark Tank since the show began in 2009, which has made him one of the most recognized business figures in the country and has given him more than a decade of watching founders pitch, including the ones who did not know what their business was. Bombas, one of his investments on the show, has passed a billion dollars in cumulative sales.

He founded and runs The Shark Group, a brand consultancy in Miami, was appointed a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama in 2015, launched Black Entrepreneurs Day in 2020, and has been named Brandweek Marketer of the Year and twice NAACP Entrepreneur of the Year. He is dyslexic and speaks about it openly.

He is booked for sales and business conferences, entrepreneur and franchise events, brand and marketing audiences, and universities, and the session is a keynote built around what he calls his SHARK points, five principles distilled from the FUBU years and the Shark Tank years together. Because the room already knows him from television, the session starts warm.