FOUNDER SERIES: DAVIS SMITH: HOW DAVIS SMITH FOUNDED THREE COMPANIES AND BUILT ONE OF THE MOST RECOGNIZABLE OUTDOOR BRANDS.

MY EARLIEST CHILDHOOD MEMORIES involve seeing people living in some of the most extreme poverty imaginable--I was born in Utah but moved to the Dominican Republic when I was four years old for my father's job as a contractor for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We lived there for a few years, before moving to Puerto Rico and then to Ecuador. While my family was far from wealthy, I always felt incredibly fortunate because it seemed we had so much in comparison to so many around us. I remember seeing children that were completely naked on the sides of the street and I remember trying to reconcile why my life was so different from theirs.

Those experiences outside of the US really shaped me and shaped how I felt about the world, what responsibilities I had, and what I needed to do with my own life. As I entered college, I began exploring a number of different career paths, but at the core of my exploration was always the desire to do something that would help others. While at Brigham Young University, I read a local newspaper article written about Steve and Bette Gibson, a successful entrepreneur and his educator wife who sold their business, moved to the Philippines, and began teaching entrepreneurship skills to help others lift themselves out of poverty.

I was so inspired by the Gibsons' story, not because they were wealthy or successful entrepreneurs, but because they had found a way to use their respective talents to help others out of poverty. I cut out the article from the newspaper, put it in the front of my clear-faced school binder, and began searching for paths that would allow me to do something similar.

A few years later, as I was finishing undergrad, I ended up randomly seeing Steve Gibson getting into an elevator at school, so I ran down the hallway and jumped in with him. He had no choice but to talk to me, and kindly invited me to meet with him a few weeks later. I wanted to convince him to expand his nonprofit to Latin America and to allow me to help him do it, and I spent lots of time crafting my pitch.

He didn't go for it, and instead encouraged me to become an entrepreneur myself because he felt that would be the best way for me to make a difference in the world. That conversation with Gibson inspired me to explore entrepreneurship to fulfill what I saw as my life's mission to help others.

BUILDING (TWO) FAMILY BUSINESSES

After graduating from BYU in 2003, my cousin Kimball Thomas and I began exploring how we might be able to start a business together. I began buying and selling used scuba gear on eBay and found that I could make a few extra bucks using this new marketplace that seemed to perfectly match supply and demand.

Through a random conversation with a friend who worked at eBay, I ultimately came up with the idea of creating our own brand of pool tables which we could manufacture in China and sell on eBay. Using free internet from an AOL disk I got in the mail, I began tracking via spreadsheet what every pool table listing on eBay sold for.

Within days, I had a pretty good sense of what a pool table would sell for and what I could manufacture one for. At the time, it seemed obvious that there was an opportunity to sell pool tables via a direct-to-consumer method online, so we borrowed about $20,000 from anyone who would give it to us--a few college friends, our grandmother, etc.--and placed our first order of pool tables.

The business turned a profit almost instantly--we did...