Sweaty Equity

On a Friday night in the Spring of 2014, 8 million people watched a pair of fresh college grads, Mike Shannon & Kasey Gandham, shake hands with billionaire Mark Cuban at the height of Shark Tank's popularity. The next day, Mike was back in the locker room of the Chicago Bulls, pulling a load of towels out of the laundry machine. His once-secretive double life was unraveling fast. Tech entrepreneur by day. NBA ball boy by night. What came next was glitz and glamor: Press. Praise. Awards. A private meeting inside of an NBA front office. The cover photo of a prominent magazine. What nobody saw coming was the crash. What nobody wanted to bet on was the rebound. The Shark Tank deal famously pitted Mark Cuban and other tech titans against the top brass of America's powerhouse textbook publishers in a rally to disrupt inflationary textbook prices. To the outside eye, the company was soaring. Behind the scenes, the walls were caving in, and the funding was running dry. All while the compounding mental weight of losing other people's money pressed down on the young founders. Written through ruthlessly self-deprecating humor & wit, fast paced dialogue-rich storytelling, and a shocking degree of transparency into everything from NBA locker room mischief, to vulnerable midnight founder journals, to high stakes board room turmoil, Sweaty Equity is a first of its kind. You won't want to put it down.