Shaquille O’Neal is a busy man. The four-time NBA champion is a broadcaster, partner of many franchises, investor, philanthropist and educator. All these elements come together in his latest project, Grinda three-episode YouTube series in which enterprising students using the Campus online learning platform compete for a $60,000 money prize.
“We wanted to give these kids and young adults a chance to showcase themselves,” Shaq told Entrepreneur on an upcoming episode of the How Success Happens podcast. “We wanted to see grit, resilience, determination and belief, and they came up with some great ideas. It was great to see that.”
The show was filmed on the investment campus Joe Lonsdaleat home in Austin, and Shaq was joined by judges Jennifer Hyman (CEO of Rent the Runway) and Poppy Thorpe (Snapchat board member) to help make the big money decision.
While the spirit of the show is to nurture recent ideas and encourage talent, it wasn’t all love. To get into the program, students went through a competitive recruitment process and participated in intensive workshops and rigorous training sessions throughout the three-part series.
Shaq routinely advised competitors to calm their nerves when it got here time to ask for funding. “I spoke from experience,” Shaq explains. “When you enter someone’s world and want to borrow money from them, you have to be confident. You need to talk to experts and learn the ins and outs of your small business. I make every effort to really understand where I stand. You don’t need to go to a meeting with Jeff Bezos and just ask for a hundred million dollars. You want Jeff to understand your small business and what you’ll do with the money.
The whole season is already behind us – binge to discover who will walk away with a life-changing investment!