09/25/2025
The first time I heard the word “entrepreneur” was in the summer before I started high school.
I was on a road trip with my parents and had stopped to stay for a few days with my aunt and her new husband in San Francisco.
It made a real impression on me when, in the middle of a workweek, her husband asked if I wanted to go see a Giants baseball game.
I asked him, “Don’t you have to work?”
It was shocking to me that a grown man could take off in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, and go to a baseball game, instead of having to be at work.
I grew up in a military family where my dad had very set times and places that he had to be, and that was just how I always assumed the world worked.
He told me, “No, I’m in charge of my schedule - it’s ok. Let’s go catch a game,” so we did.
While I was there at the game with him, I will also never forget that he had a pocket full of $100 bills and would pay cash with everything. It made an impression on me...I had never seen that kind of cash before.
So of course I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was an entrepreneur.
I had never heard that word and had no clue, so I asked him to explain it.
He took a good amount of time with me to explain to me from his perspective how the world of capitalism worked, and even got me a subscription to the Wall Street Journal to encourage me to start paying attention to the business news and follow a few stocks.
That was the first time that I realized it was possible to have freedom from somebody telling you when and where you had to be.
That left a mark on me, and was the initial spark of motivation for me to be an entrepreneur.
Freedom has been my #1 goal as an entrepreneur, not money or fancy things (although I like those things, too!).
So yesterday, when a good friend and business partner asked if I wanted to go to the Padres baseball game at 1pm on a Wednesday, it made me think of this memory and smile.
GO PADRES!
