Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite
A King's Journey to Social Entrepreneurship with Rahsaan King
Ever wondered how it feels to walk the hallowed halls of Harvard only to drop out and then return to walk the stage at graduation? Meet Rahsaan King – a Harvard dropout, entrepreneur, and inspirational figure whose story is anything but ordinary. Our conversation unwraps his journey from an eager high-schooler with big dreams to a struggling Harvard student grappling with mental health, imposter syndrome, and a sense of alienation.
Rahsaan's resilience and strength saw him through some of the darkest days of his life, and he shares the transformative experience he had after joining the Harvard Polo Club. Tackling the world of the elite, Rahsaan discovered that success goes beyond the confines of a classroom, and it was this realization that helped him complete his degree while managing his budding business. His story is not just about overcoming personal challenges, it's a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of determination.
Finally, we trace Rahsaan's current mission of transforming a healthcare desert into a potentially thriving oasis back in his hometown, Houston. His experiences at Harvard are now shaping the lives of people in his community. This episode serves as a testament to Rahsaan's unyielding spirit – an inspiring chapter for anyone looking for a spark of motivation and a reminder that it's never too late to rewrite your story. Join us as we delve into Rahsaan's compelling journey – a tale filled with obstacles, triumphs, and one man's unwavering spirit of resilience.
So, rassan, I first heard about you, I think while you were in undergrad at Harvard, ok, and MJ. Mj was like man, my mentee's going to Harvard, like Ivy League school. It was like I'm so proud of him. And then at some point in the story he's like yo, my mentee stopped going to school. I asked him like what's up with your MJ, what's up with your mentee at Harvard? He was like man, that brother stopped school. I was like what? He stopped going to Harvard. He's like, yeah, man, and like MJ was like he was concerned, he was worried, but then he started breaking down this business that you were starting when you took like a gap year or two from Harvard and whatnot. And so I'm wondering, can you, can you talk, to talk to us about what it meant for you to be I'm going to say this in quotations right A college dropout who still wound up being Harvard graduate, right, and the courage it took to kind of take that unconventional path and then come back and still finish.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a big question. So first of all, before I went to Harvard, I started my business. So when I was in high school I went to a boarding school on a scholarship and the same school MJ went to. So we went to the same high school. If you didn't know that, it was a college preparatory boarding school for underrepresented students.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:While I was there, I saw this huge divide between my peers there and my peers back home who I grew up with. I had for every one kid that was going give me one second. I'm sorry, my father just sent me something. Okay, sorry about that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:All right, so yeah, so I started and that was, excuse me. I'm driving right now to meet my father. We are in the process of building a hospital named after my grandmother in my old neighborhood so the same neighborhood I'm about to tell you about. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right now we're doing something called the SETI gas revitalization project to try to help uplift that community. But okay, so my friends in my high school, every week they were getting opportunities to study abroad, getting accepted to prestigious colleges, getting internships at investment banks, writing journals and blogs that were getting published, getting prominent media attention. We're basically there, back to Richard's story. Yeah, but then every weekend when I went back home to my peers in my neighborhood, people were getting shot in the face or were on the run from the police or having ankle monitors or getting incarcerated.
Speaker 2:It was more common for my friends to go to prison than it was to go to college. On my street when I grew up, there was like 10 of us. There was JJ, there was Brandon, there was Day Day, there was BJ, there was Derek Jason, a couple others. Dan. Thomas, chris Dixon and me, and by the time I was 17, chris was dead. Dan was dead. Day Day was dead. Dj was in prison. Brandon was in prison.
Speaker 2:Jj was in prison for killing Day Day. Bj went to college at prayer view and dropped out. He was older than that, so he didn't graduate. There was nobody who did anything even close at all to what the kids in my high school were up to, and so I felt that and I wanted to change that. And so my business was originally intended to try to provide mentorship and tutoring and vocational opportunities for inner city students so that they could have opportunities, maybe not necessarily to go to Harvard, but to go to college or even community or to a degree or a ticket that could earn a job and, more importantly, to keep them off the streets where possible to get them into church. But basically it was a ministry business, nonprofit. The lines were very blurred because at the time.
Speaker 2:I didn't really care about the structure, I just cared about the mission. Well then, my senior year of high school, that summer, between junior and senior year, I did this program at Rice called the Rice Summer Business Institute, and that Rice Summer Business Institute taught me about entrepreneurship, it taught me about stock, it taught me about marketing and branding.
Speaker 2:It taught me about running and managing a business, a small business. And so then, when I went into my senior year, rather than just doing the nonprofit ministry do good type work, I was thinking how could I turn that into a business? And I have recently read a book by the founder of Tom Shoes called Start Something that Matters, and it was all about how Tom Shoes was. For every one shoe that they sold, they had enough revenue to give one shoe away to, one pair of shoes away to someone in another country who didn't have shoes.
Speaker 2:And the fact that you could have a profitable business model that was giving people something for free really stood out to me. So my dream was to do that for tutoring. And for every one hour of tutoring that you bought, let's say, you were paying me $50 an hour and I was paying a college student $20 an hour. So for every one hour of tutoring that you bought for me, I could pay that college student to tutor somebody else for free and still have a $10 profit. So that model really appealed to me. So I started that my senior year of high school.
Speaker 2:And then by the time I got into Harvard. First of all, I went to Harvard early. I didn't wait until the fall to start school. I enrolled in starter school right away in the summer. So I started school in June just to get a jump on it and honestly I wanted to get away from Houston so fast and so bad the prospect of sticking around for another summer. I wasn't having it, bro as soon as.
Speaker 2:I graduated high school on May 25th. I enrolled in Harvard on June 8th, and so, long story short, I went to school with my business. So it isn't that I left school to start the business it's that I went to school with the business.
Speaker 2:Now, when I got out to Harvard, harvard is no joke and the idea that you're going to work 30 hours a week on a company and take these four or five classes a semester and go to these study halls and do these labs with these kids that went to the real board for these schools man, I was under distress. I was not sleeping, I wasn't eating. Well, I was losing weight. I had imposter syndrome.
Speaker 2:I was insecure. All of these Lilly Pulitzer girls that grew up with 40 acres and a mule weren't trying to go out on any dates with a young kid from SETI GAD. So I was single at the Pringle and I also was struggling with the business because this was my first time running a business and getting customers, getting employees, balancing a budget man I was hardly afloat as a young, black, poor college student and then adding a business on top of that made it even harder.
Speaker 2:There were times that I was using my scholarships to pay my employees. I straight up, paid employees with money I was supposed to be using to pay for food, and so I did that my freshman year, and at the end of my freshman year I almost killed myself. I went to study abroad in China and then study abroad. People put me on the top floor of a hotel. They thought they were doing something.
Speaker 2:Man, I was so depressed on that top floor, looking down from that balcony, that I was on the edge of it and I was thinking about jumping and not in like a like. I was a second away from jumping, but I was a minute away from it and I started crying and I called my ex-girlfriend at the time, because also me and her were on the rocks.
Speaker 2:My high school sweetheart, brianna, was trying to support me through that journey, but there was just no way for her to do that from Atlanta. She was a million miles away. She had no idea what I was going through. And I was trying to hold it together, and so I called her and she was there for me. © All rights reserved. You know that next semester I went back to school and they had something called final clubs.
Speaker 2:So, final clubs are like fraternities and that's basically how you get slotted into, how cool you are If you get into one club and you damn near can write your destiny. You get into the other club. You'll at least get one of the top 20 eligible bachelorettes on campus to look your way. You get into the other club. You get into another club. At least you'll have a lot of parties and a bit of social life on the weekends. If you get into another club, you'll get a job on Wall Street more or less guaranteed, like you know to be, an analyst at Goldman Sachs is that's pretty much a given.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I went down this list, rejection from rejection to rejection. I also was picking my concentration, my major, and originally I came in guns blazing. I was applied math and economics and I was going to get a minor in education by taking classes at the grad school. So, I went to Harvard. I went to Harvard talking a bunch of shit and I was going to take six classes of domestic play club basketball.
Speaker 2:Matter of fact, I was going to walk on to the varsity basketball team and do research. Bro, I was so naive. There's an expression they say that life has Anne, and Mike Tyson has a similar expression that says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth. I don't know if you ever saw those fighting videos of Mike Tyson going into the ring and just walking straight up to him and popping him in the mouth and giving one of those five seconds one of those five second knockouts, bro.
Speaker 2:My sophomore year was one of those five second knockouts. I went in and went right out I mean right out and so, yeah, I dropped out of school. Goddamn right, I dropped the fuck out of school. I dropped out of school so bad that I didn't even move out. I had a nice leather couch that I had brought up from Texas. That man, my girl, got a good will. I had these beautiful lamps. I had a mahogany bookshelf, bro. My dorm looked like a Ralph Lauren bookstore.
Speaker 2:I dropped out so fast, bro, that I wasn't even done unpacking by the time it was time to pack, and that's just the truth. And so what saved me, though, was that, when you drop out if you say I'm dropping out because I'm depressed, that's one thing. If you say I'm dropping out because the academic workload is too much for me to handle, that's another thing. I forgot to tell you that my grandmother passed away during this time, and so I was, really, really, really in the dumps. I cried at her funeral. Audrey Whiting, I cried at Audrey Whiting's funeral, audrey. Then I cried for anything else other than my whole life.
Speaker 2:And I had a bunch of other reasons to cry before that. Well, so long story short. If you drop out of school because you are grieving a death, okay, there's a different set of accommodations for that PTSD bereavement. If you drop out of school because you're starting a business or running a business, there's a different set of accommodations for that. So fortunately, I didn't have to drop out. I went to the dean's office and I said look man, my grandmother passed away. I can't even focus on school. I break down crying trying to do a math homework.
Speaker 2:I can't even get out of bed on time to get PM the previous day. So that's what I told to our and that was true and then to my family. It was that I have this business that I really believe in and I did it and I wanted that business to help make a new trajectory for our family. My mom was getting federal assistance, my dad.
Speaker 2:The only reason he wasn't getting federal assistance is just because he didn't apply. My grandmother was a school bus driver. My grandfather had a business, my grandmother had a business, so we had a lot of opportunities and way more professionalism than other poor black people. And, if we're honest about it, I wasn't really poor. I lived in the hood and I was in violent traumatic situations. I definitely had all of the symptoms of the ghetto, including wanting to join gangs and all of that, including people that are not a jail, including all of the things that you expect, but my clothes was nicer than all of my friends.
Speaker 2:The car I went to school in was nicer than all of my friends. The exposure I had, even to have access to people like MJ was way more, at least, than all of my friends. So there's this sociologist named Anthony Jack.
Speaker 2:He has this idea called the privileged poor. There's the doubly disadvantaged. That's another group of people. Then there's the privileged poor. I'm adding to his research and my research a third category called the upper lower class. I was in that upper lower class. I'll tell you more about that later. But long story short. To my family they weren't trying to hear too many reasons of why I was leaving Harvard After the Houston Chronicle newspaper was at our house with the camera talking about going to Harvard and when Shell Oil Company had me on their nationwide commercial talking about going to Harvard.
Speaker 2:There weren't too many reasons why I got home, but this business that was going to make up.
Speaker 2:I came back home and I started trying to grow my business and one thing led to another. So we can talk about that with more of your questions, but I just wanted to give you the context that I didn't drop out of Harvard to start the business. I went to Harvard with the business and then, while at school, a various set of factors led to me leaving, and you're right, I did eventually, three years later, go back to graduate, but that's how we got there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is how and you know, I was just talking to MJ, so I don't have all the details he just would brag about his mentee at Harvard, and so in my mind I had it was a story. It was like a story we hear about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates with his business idea and they drop out for the purposes strictly for the purposes of the business. But yours was certainly more layered and more interesting.
Speaker 2:That's bro. That's marketing man. Zuckerberg dropped out for a similar reason.
Speaker 2:Now he had the business. Don't get me wrong, but that's the way that the script looks. After you have a billion dollars to rewrite it, but the cameras weren't with you. In the dorm room where you're crying your eyes out, the cameras aren't with you when you get that first B I'm talking about a whole 18 year career of straight A and then now you walking around talking about some C's get degrees, bro. They don't have the cameras there when you're going to that.
Speaker 2:And so, zuckerberg, it isn't as unique as I had this business idea, so I'm going to mortgage my Harvard to go start Facebook, and a lot of times those things are built during these very painful periods of time. The energy that it takes to create a billion dollar business doesn't just come to you as an epiphany, bro. That shit comes in rock bottom Because if it came to you as an epiphany, we would have way more billionaires than we have. If it came to you as I'm just going to drop out as Harvard to start a business, we would have way more billionaires than we have. Zuckerberg left in the same sense.
Speaker 1:That's interesting Because it made me wonder, listening to your story, is all of these college dropouts who wind up being super successful Kanye West, zuckerberg, gates, whatever that's the real story behind them dropping out? So yeah, again, looking at your bio and being at Harvard, there's something I noticed and so you talked about. I can't remember what you called them, but they're like the social clubs with the different statuses. What did they call them? They're like fraternities. What did they call Final clubs? Say it one more time.
Speaker 2:Final clubs. Final clubs.
Speaker 1:Final clubs. Okay, all right. So there's all of these final clubs, and so, as I was looking at your bio on your website and say you were part of the Harvard Polo Club, so what was that? Were you playing polo, or was that just the name of a final club that you were a part of?
Speaker 2:I was playing polo, bro. So basically here's what happened. We had career day and. I'm gonna preface this not in a not in a not in a. I remember Matt doing it some way. I'm not saying it, I'm just saying this as the way it's coming out. But I have never personally had any sort of attraction to a man personally, but for one day we were at career fair and they had all of the clubs.
Speaker 2:They had the soccer club, the football club, the tree club, the wine tasting society. They had the black student union, Every organization on campus and they were just like regular posts you would expect to see on any college Yeohan. He walked through the crowd and the crowd literally parted like the Red Sea bro. This dude had on some white starched Levi jeans with some like knee high brown leather boots. The boots look like they cost like $10,000.
Speaker 2:He had on a green polo shirt with the big horse on it, with the big three on it. He had a polo mallet that's the stick that you use to hit the ball. It looks like a croquet club, but longer over his shoulder, and he had that like Justin Bieber. Blonde hair Bro, this dude. If a billion dollars could look like a person, this person was that guy.
Speaker 2:And it later turns out that he actually was a billionaire, which is what is hilarious about it. But when I saw this dude walk, I've never seen a person in my whole life have more juice, like just straight up gravitas, that like no matter if there's 10,000 people in the room. This person is definitely among the most interesting, among the most successful, and he was also very athletic. He was like six, three with muscles and a chiseled jawline.
Speaker 2:I honestly, had never seen someone like that in my life. He looked like Tom Brady and I made up in that like millisecond that whatever club this dude is in that he's about to walk to right now, whatever table he stops at, I'm going to sign up for that club on site without even thinking about it. And that was the polo club. So when I went to an choir they told me that it was an aristocratic sport that basically princes play.
Speaker 2:And my last name is King. So anything that, anything that princes play is pretty much already up my alley. It turns out that a few people on the team like actually were a prince, like it wasn't that their name was printed, wasn't that they were trying to be fly and call themselves print, it wasn't a suit. And them like, no, this nigga was actually print such and such and so. And then I like to ride horses because I'm from Texas. Then they told me that polo was like playing golf on a horse. I played golf in high school on the golf team. They told me that it was kind of physical, so that it was also like playing football on a horse, because you actually like running to other people's horses to try to knock them off their their trajectory.
Speaker 2:So playing football and golf on a horse really, really, really was attractive. And doing it with princes off campus in this elitist group of undergrad Bro, it was like they damn near hypnotize me. And I'm telling you in that way because it was a little, I think, ego driven and identity driven I really want it to be cool, I really wanted to be successful, I really wanted to be around cool and Basically like hypnotize me into playing polo, Honestly and then when we would go play polo, we would drive by.
Speaker 2:to get to the barn we had to go past some of the largest states I've ever seen in my life. Bro, I'm talking like four story 18, overlooking a left that just had like 20 horses galloping around it. It looked like a British movie from the 1800s about Prince such and such having tea with his art, who was the Duchess of such and such.
Speaker 2:And this was just like real. This was real people of life. I'm still a part of the Harvard Friends of Polo and also I still go out there. Every time I'm in Massachusetts I go up to Hamilton Mass, up to myopia, to watch the Polo matches or to go to the club because bro, coming from where I came from, I saw people were a whore but their horses were skinny, they were on trail rides. They weren't properly, they were on the road.
Speaker 2:If you got somebody who was kind of a horse it was they would say brown. They didn't have that riding English Wearing a. I've never seen champagne on a horse my whole life in Harvard. It's a long story short the Harvard Polo Club that was a true introduction to real high society.
Speaker 2:I thought I knew wealthy people in Houston because you might have been a lawyer or you might have owned some restaurants, or even people who had oil money. You might have you drive the big body brand new bins instead of the used old C-Class, and so I thought I knew what money was. But on the Polo team I met people that had billions of dollars for hundreds of years. I met people who their parents were born with more money than everyone in Houston that I know combined. So everyone in Houston that I know on a first name basis, let's say that's 100 people. Let's say that's 300 people, let's say I know 300 people in Houston on a first name basis, all of the money that those people have combined right, I met on the Polo team multiple people who not only them, not only their parents, but their grandparents had more money themselves as one person than all 300 of those people in Houston combined.
Speaker 2:And so in the space of those type of people, like 10 of them at the same time on a daily basis, really did change my outlook on money specifically, but on the world as well, and what it truly means to be successful, and I tried to the best of my ability to just soak up all of that knowledge and culture.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering. We got five minutes left, so I'm gonna make this the last question for this session. When you joined the Polo Club, was that after you had already come back? And if so, what did being part of that community do for you in terms of you being able to get through the rest of your time at Harvard while also managing your business?
Speaker 2:It was, when I came back, what it did for me. It honestly taught me how to live life in a different way. The rest of my life was like survival mode. But to just like drive 50 minutes outside of campus to shovel horseshit and to feed horses and to ride horses and to drink champagne, and to just like sit over a campfire and look up at the stars.
Speaker 2:Bro, there were times in my earlier life where, as crazy as this sounds, bro and I don't want to sound sad I had never seen the sunset Like actually sitting there and watching the sun go from having not yet set to over a 30 minute period of time, watching it sink beneath the horizon, to the point to where you see that little green dot up here, where there are people who grew up on the beach or who grew up on a field where you could, everything around you was yours, you could see an uninterrupted view to where you can see the sunset. Because to see the sunset requires that for your entire field of vision to be uninterrupted by buildings, to be uninterrupted by light pollution, to be uninterrupted by terrain and trees, and so where does poor people see? 200 miles of nothing, recreationally. So hanging out with these people were the first time that I was in spaces or on properties or even just on the beach in a way that allowed me to watch the sunset. So I'm saying that to say that I learned how to live my life in a completely different modality and with a lot more ease and with a lot less anxiety. People are never complaining about money, where I never heard the mention of a bill. To this day, I haven't even seen a bill from the Polo team Nigga. I ate lobster caviar champagne. I rode 20 horses all over the country. I haven't even seen a bill yet.
Speaker 2:And so just this level of excess to where everything is available and nothing is a concern. While it wasn't my life, that wasn't my real life. I had concerns the whole time, even while they were talking about how unconcerned they were. I was thinking about my concerns the whole time. But just seeing that another type of life was possible, it really changed my approach to the rest of my life and it did lower my anxiety. It did help me laugh and be free and have fun. It taught me how to be a kid in a different type of a way. It taught me how families could be. These kids had multi-generational family businesses and family trust. I learned a lot about the tax code of how to put this property in an LLC and to put this farm in a trust and to get this life insurance policy.
Speaker 2:So all of those types of rules of engagement I got to incorporate not only into my business but frankly over the course of my life, to the point to where, right now, tomorrow, I'm meeting with my aunt about a family farm and working with my loved ones and company on a family trust.
Speaker 2:And right now I have this hospital that I'll tell you about next time under my name in an LLC. So a lot of the game that I got from those kids and their parents. Frankly, I was able to eventually start to access for myself, including tasting wine. So the last thing I'll leave you with is my boy, justin, who I told you about, who has the wine business. I'm able to help him with his business. It's because I was on the wine tasting team in that wine society and that was all connected to the Polo Club, so it actually is giving me a source of income 10 years later.
Speaker 1:Well, brother, that's that. That story is dope. I look forward to learning more about your journey. The next time we're going to do it in Houston, for sure, and I did read up about you and the work that you're doing to turn a health care desert into a health care oasis, and so I look forward to learning more about that journey and maybe some more about your time at Harvard and how that how that experience helps you leverage the good things that you're doing now in the community in Houston.
Speaker 2:Thank you, man, and I want to plug you and my boy, justin, as well, after this via tech.
Speaker 1:Appreciate you, man. You have a good day and we'll be in touch. Sounds good. All right brother, Thank you.