Justin GordonFounder, The LA Grind & The SF Grind

A $100M+ Founder's Incredible Origin Story

15 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, the founder explains why he became an entrepreneur, tracing his motivation back to childhood side‑hustles like selling balloon animals at age 12. He describes a long‑standing belief that entrepreneurs are "born, not bred," noting that for the past two decades the perception of entrepreneurship in academia has shifted—from viewing it as an innate talent to believing it can be taught in business schools. This personal narrative establishes his innate drive to create, build, and own ventures, framing his multiple company launches as a natural extension of that early entrepreneurial spirit.

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You've started multiple companies, pretty impressive. There's lots to dive into with each one of them, but why did you become a founder in the first place?
I've seen kind of the arc of how schools view entrepreneurship and kind of how entrepreneurship is represented in the zeitgeist change over the last 20-some years. It used to, I think, very commonly be the case that, or people used to largely think that entrepreneurs were born, not bred, and you couldn't so much teach it. Like B-school was for teaching middle management skills as opposed to raw entrepreneurship skills. You know, I think, you know, people have moved on that and think that you can teach the trade, but I was very much in the former camp. I was just a born entrepreneur. I've been, you know, selling things to my hapless friends since, you know, my childhood. And it's just like always been very motivated to create things and build things and own things and, you know, be the captain of my own ship in some way. So it goes back as far as I can remember. I've sold balloon animals at street fairs at the age of 12. I, you know, ran a bunch of side hustles as a kid, as far as I can remember. But it's very much either in the genes or somehow picked it up in vitro.