A Ball Boy, A Billionaire, and the Bonkers Startup Tale You've Never Heard
“In all my years in the NBA and on Shark Tank, investing in another team’s ball boy was an odd first. Mike’s got a laundry basket full of mistakes-turned-lessons to share, and a wildly entertaining story!“
– Mark Cuban
Hi I’m Mike.
Dad.
Writer.
Entrepreneur.
Fastest Mop in the NBA Eastern Conference.
If this were a fundraising pitch, I’d say something professional-sounding about founding my first company at age 21, learning through its V1 failure, pivot, intense down-round, rebound, and eventual exit for north of $50 million. I might sprinkle in some of the founder team accolades such as Inc. 500, Forbes & Crains’ young success lists, Fast Company’s Ten Most Innovative Companies in Edu, TIME’s World’s Top EdTech Companies, etc. etc. yawn, yawn, boring-as-hell, yawn…
But this isn’t a VC pitch deck. This is the landing page for the book that I probably should not have written. This is where you come to find the real s**t. The messy s**t. The embarrassing “please do not actually publish this” s**t.
So come on in.
Why did I write it?
Why bother reading it?
As a young gun, I used to roam the library halls, ditching homework assignments in search of something else. Something I rarely found.
I had this insatiable curiosity to experience tales of what really went down beyond the locked doors of entrepreneurship & pro sports.
What I found instead was… boring.
Tell-how business books that read like ghost written consultancy pamphlets. Grownups out to impress grownups.
Gimme a break.
I don’t need another instruction manual to adulting.
I want the messy juice.
The real story.
The guts of your midnight journal from back when you were my age, facing defeat.
I’m not sure if they were keeping a journal like that.
So when I got let loose into the wild, I did.
Figured maybe I could sneak a message in a bottle for that next young gun roaming those same library halls, still coming up empty-handed. Little did I know what type of crazy sh*t my pen would capture as it happened.
10 years of in-the-trenches journal entries.
5 years spent mining those pages.
1,000 hours in Dark AM writing & editing sessions.
Here you go.
You know who you are.
Sweaty Equity was written for you.
Book Chapters
Designed to be a fast read, about the length of The Great Gatsby.
Read the first two chapters and you’ll know whether you hate it or crave some more.
Whatever you do, please don’t read Chapter Six.