Today's guest of this special live episode of the Unicorn podcast is entrepreneur, philanthropist, billionaire, and now author, John Caldwell. John founded Caldwell Group, the telco company, which included phones for you. When he sold Caldwell Group in 2006, the business was selling 26 phones a minute. But after all his success, John says that nothing gives him the same feeling as helping people. And while remaining active in the business world, he devotes most of his time to his lifelong philanthropic ambitions, pledging to donate 70% of his wealth to charitable causes. Let's get into the podcast. Well, John, thank you, first of all, for sparing time for us all here today to come and share some knowledge and some inspiration, some insight. So thank you, first of all, I know how busy you are. Pleasure.

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look, why don't we start off, I ask a lot of the audience to give me things that they'd like to know from you. And what we'll do in a moment is we will go to the audience and ask you guys to ask questions. I always think that's the best way to find out what you guys would like to hear. Before we do that, just a few things I wanted to talk to you about and know myself. So one of the things I was really interested in, your journey of entrepreneurship seems so natural and you talk about it a lot, about how you were an entrepreneur from a young age. And do you think entrepreneurs are born or bred? I

think the answer to that is very simple. Everybody that's really good at what they do are born and then they have to work like fury. The people that are not born with the skills can still advance and do very very well but you're never going to be a world champion 100 meter sprinter unless you're born to be so and you're never going to be that champion unless you then work flat out to achieve the objective so it's a combination of genetic luck and then sheer graft and hard work but that shouldn't demotivate anybody that might not have the full skills to to you know shoot the lights out because you can still be incredibly successful just by hard work and learning on the job which is something i've actually done for

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