Aside from being the NFL’s highest paid player, Seattle Seahawks Quarterback Russell Wilson is also one of its most entrepreneurial.
How did he become such a behemoth of business, well, he listens to guys like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Wilson has his fashion label, Good Man Brand, his production company, West2East, the Jeff Bezos-backed gaming app Tally, and his philanthropic foundation, Why Not You.
Wilson lays out the most important elements of his success and the most valuable advice he learned from Jeff Bezos:
Via Fast Company:
“I think the most memorable thing [Jeff Bezos] said to me—we were just kind of hanging out, and I was asking about the beginnings of Amazon. Obviously, he’s created one of the biggest, largest, best companies in the world, and I said, ‘Jeff, when you were thinking about Amazon, did you think this could happen?’ And he said, ‘Did I think it would be exactly like this? All the things that we’re doing? Not necessarily.’ But he said, ‘I think anything can happen.’ And when I asked him, ‘So when you were creating Amazon, how’d you raise money? What happened?’ He said, ‘For me, I wanted to go raise a million dollars, so what I did was, I went to 60 plus people, and I said ‘Hey, give me $50,000. I got an idea.’ Only 22 people said yes. He said, ‘That’s all I needed. All I need is 22 people to say yes.’ Think about that. And when you think about that, there’s 7.5 billion people in the world. For 22 people to say yes to a small idea, that becomes one of the largest companies in the world? Anything’s feasible.”
So lesson learned is you only need a handful of people with money to believe in you.
Russell has earned so much, hopefully he’ll pay it forward, and be one of the 22 people handing out others some startup capital.
Always nice to have wealthy friends.
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