The entrepreneurial journey of Mark Rampolla, focusing on his personal growth and challenges, such as navigating post-exit struggles.
The entrepreneurial journey of Mark Rampolla, focusing on his personal growth and challenges, such as navigating post-exit struggles and achieving inner fulfillment alongside business success.
And then through some conversations, you know, with friends and family and and and my my my then wife as well, I started to develop some criteria. Okay, these are all great, but like what how am I going to know if it's a great idea? And so I I I developed a list of criteria, you know, some of the typical business ones, big c big industry, you know, good enough margins, opportunity to disrupt, opportunity to build something endurable. But then there were the personal ones. How will this fit with my lifestyle? Can I get out of bed and just be super energized about this? How will my girls think about this 20 years from now? Right? Is it consistent with my lifestyle? And those are the criteria that eliminated trucking, eliminated rolling up the dairy industry and started to put more of like food beverage. But at the same time, their approach was Latin American at the time investing, which is
basically like you put up the capital, you own the company, right? And I was not in the mindset of Silicon Valley. I wasn't in the US to sort of absorb and think about that. So I gave away a lot of the company for that million bucks, right? But I but that to me seemed like a fortune. And so I had a business plan. I we decided to go to New York. So with a million dollars, I quit my job, moved to New York, brought my you wife and and young girls there. And we were bankrupt, technically bankrupt within six months. >> Wow. And so I'll tell you through some of the some of the journey, but basically the next five years was raising money every year, little by little by little by little, but we were growing, but it was brutal.