In 2004, David was wrapping up his freshman year at Baylor University and started his first business. His parents told him they would give him money towards his MBA or his first business, and he immediately took the seed funding and ran with it. By college graduation however, the company was not yet large enough to support a full-time salary, so David moved in with his sister who was working on her Masters degree. He slept on a Coleman air mattress for 9 months on the living room floor and went on the road pitching investors to raise a round of funding. The first 40 investors turned him down and he was down to just $300 in savings with the reality approaching he was going to have to go out and get a job. He firmly believed that God had a plan and he had to just keep going. After nearly 100 pitches, five investors came on board and provided the $250,000 in funding required to grow the business. The same day the round of funding was closed, his air mattress popped, and he was able to get his own apartment and buy a real bed.
Fast forward to today and David has started over twenty businesses (several of those with Boss Club co-founder Charlie Gasmire). In 2012 David and Charlie co-founded Vendevor, an ecommerce software business which successfully sold to Payscape in July of 2015.
David’s recent successes include First Centurion Group which sold a variety of consumer goods from its own line of skin care products and work-out supplements and generated nearly $40 million in online sales and grew to over 50 employees and was one of the fastest growing start-ups in 2013.
November 2019 David sold Pegasus Fulfillment, to Selery Fulfillment, a Mark Cuban backed company. Pegasus Fulfillment was a company he built with his father Mike Grubbs, which handled inventory warehousing and online order fulfillment for over a dozen different ecommerce businesses including his own.
Withmany startups under his belt David has learned there is a recipe to starting businesses which enables businesses to be launched faster and with less risk. Those hard-learned lessons from nearly two decades were disseminated into a unique Entrepreneurship course he taught at Baylor University with Dr. Kendall Artz and Dr. Les Palich where 12 hand selected students were given funding to start real businesses over the course of a semester. The program was a success and the core of Boss Club’s curriculum is based on all the principles taught in that college level course.
In his free time David loves flying (as a private pilot), riding horses, scuba diving, reading, learning Spanish, and participating in his church. David lives in a small rural town in Costa Rica and is married to his wife of four years, Daniella, who runs her own not-for-profit equine therapy center to help people with disabilities. Their first son, Sam, was born in 2020.
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