Meet Davin, a serial entrepreneur that is passionate about and on a personal growth journey.

After starting and selling his first company with 4 Co-Founders, Mesmo, which led to a divorce, he started his personal growth journey in earnest. He realized that he was navigating life without the right tools.

With five companies under his belt, including one that he sold, GSN Games, he’s no stranger to the grind and stresses of entrepreneurship. But hey, he’s definitely not here to dish out financial advice as a “successful” entrepreneur that still needs to work ;-).

After selling that company, Davin had the luxury of founding the Disco Space Shuttle LLC (aka DSS), a year-round community based in SF, and a Burning Man Art Car and Camp. The DSS was founded in 2011 and continues to thrive, with the most beautiful humans, who have accelerated their growth journeys through the support of the community.

Davin grew up in a middle-class family in “The Valley”, in LA. Definitely not the Silicon one where he started his career ;-). He grew up as the third child of four, and quickly learned how to mediate between his siblings and parents, as a very shy child.

While that role taught him the art of listening, its consequence was a much less well developed ability to experience and express his own feelings. He didn’t realize at the time that he was connecting with people, but watching his life go by and not actively making it happen. He didn’t know how much power he had.

His first year of high school, at 13 years old, and a chance opportunity to work in the Foot Locker stockroom during the summer, changed his life. Davin took pride and initiative in the work, got promoted at the end of the summer, earned his stripes, and was selling shoes alongside adults. He learned that you are the only one that can change your life.

Since that experience, Davin sought and chased his goals differently and has gone on to have a very successful academic and professional career. But throughout, it has been the adversity, the challenges, that have underpinned his resilience and his growth journey. An unexpected Math class failure, his first one, interestingly inversely correlated to his now accomplished late night socializing and connecting skills. It taught him the harsh lesson that the system was not going to bend for him.

He fought and found his way back to not only good grades, but the ability to manage the competition, that he alone was struggling with in his own mind, and it was working against his goals. He built the systems and tools to take his life into his own hands.

Davin earned an opportunity, rare with only a 3.3 GPA from UC Berkeley, to interview with two investment banks. He got those interviews with the lowest GPA of anyone that they interviewed because they saw that he was hungry, aka driven. He ended up becoming the #1 analyst at that bank for a year, but that glory was short-lived, as his best friend and a privileged Yale graduate came in a year later and knocked him down a tiny notch, with the utmost kindness, love, and respect.

Since then Davin has had multiple failures in business, investments, relationships, and life. His third company, Include Capital (aka Pimes), worked to eradicate poverty in developing countries. Every developed country in the world got there by giving small and medium business owners in developing countries access to credit, whether via loans or personal credit card debt. Pimes launched an online lending service in Colombia, a developing country in 2015, where 80%+ of the banks were owned by three banking families. Online lending, a VC funded and proven business model in the US with multiple IPOs, enables small business owners to get a loan solely based on a credit scoring algorithm with no collateral. We successfully developed and proved a credit scoring algorithm in Colombia. Banks in developing countries require collateral which those in poverty earning less than $2 a day, 30%+ of the people in Colombia, do not have. Unfortunately, Pimes failed due to a lack of VC funding and eventually COVID. Colombia has the worst branding for VCs in the US that only invest in Mexico. Apparently Pablo Escobar’s cartel and violence in the 1980’s is still preventing US VCs from investing in a beautiful country with the most solid economy in the world. Colombia had ~75 years of consistent positive GDP growth except for one year prior to COVID, more than any country in the world. They also have amazing and talented entrepreneurs, some of the best in Latin America, but US VCs only invest in companies in Mexico, the new home of the cartels.

Skillprint is his fourth company, an AI company that is helping game players to find games that can positively affect their mind. As with all media and entertainment, games, the largest media and entertainment industry in the world, can help a person to relax, focus, laugh, cheer them up when they need it most, build cognitive skills, change their personality, and accelerate their growth journey. Games can and will change the world to one that we all want to live in. Over 60% of the people in the world, children, women, men, it, they, and them of all ages, play games daily on mobile, consoles, and/or desktop computers.

Life is hard, but if you want the most out of it and to achieve your dreams: face your fears, try things, do things, do what you love, have fun with it, and don’t be afraid to fail. Along the way, Davin’s strategies evolved. It wasn’t just he that could change his own life after all. Turns out, there are so many people that can help and support you on your journey.

Davin’s personal growth journey is present across his life and pursuits, but it has been marked with a few particularly foundational experiences. One, a Vipassana 10 day silent meditation, was one of the hardest things that he has put himself through. He learned how to quiet the noise of media, family, friends, and others around him. After six hard days of meditating for ~14 hours a day, and not looking at or talking to anyone, he discovered the inner-peace and happiness that we all have within us.

In a three week retreat at Casa Betulla, an amazing non-profit in Tegna, Switzerland that uses eastern and western therapeutic practices to help you to see yourself and to help you to grow, Davin realized that he didn’t have enough self-love.

In a radically different experience, he then went to Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within. Tony is a master and very accessible, and taught Davin ways to build self-love and how to use his power, power that he already had, to help him achieve everything that he wants in life.

His biggest lesson? Self-love. When you have that you don’t need to seek validation from others.

Time is not endless. Davin uses his time and energy to continue to learn, love, and live a happier and healthier life, and is committed to helping others to achieve the same.