“I don’t know if it’s my personality, but I see only huge advantages to being a military entrepreneur,” Burden says. “There’s such a strong community supporting the military.”
He considered a magnetic vest where the tools could hang like refrigerator magnets, and wondered about the possibility of tying tools on strings. “Then I was in my mom’s car, and I saw a non-slip mat on her dashboard,” he says. “I thought, ‘We could make these larger for tools and put them on top of the aircraft. The aircraft is made out of aluminum so you can’t have a magnet up there to hold your tools.
The first day, he sold just 13 from a makeshift booth made out of a garage door with a bedsheet over it. Anxious about failure, he decided he needed to do more. “I crashed people’s after parties, and just starting selling Grypmats at the after parties,” he says. “I was out of my comfort zone. Then word started to spread.”
Buoyed by that success, Burden went home, and sold his house, raising a total of $17,000 to fund the nascent business. “I was couch-surfing,” he says, with a laugh. But things took off.and then got on the hit television show Shark Tank, raising the company’s visibility dramatically. He also gained funding there from Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner and Richard Branson, a guest shark on the episode, who invested $360,000 for a 30% stake in the business, valuing Grypmat at $1.2 million.
“A rags to riches story to distract you from the colossal failure unregulated capitalism has become, while also reinforcing the lie of meritocracy” Good on him but he’s the exception to the rule.
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