Fawn Weaver: One thing leads to another, and a billion-dollar business is born

Fawn Weaver had a story to tell — and then she became the story. It started as a passion project, to make sure that the story of the first known African-American master distiller would no longer be lost to time. But while righting that historical wrong the serial entrepreneur got an idea so crazy that it just might've worked.

It did.

Her plan to make sure that Nathan “Nearest” Green would finally be celebrated took a new, serendipitous and daunting turn: Weaver decided that she could create a whisky brand named for Green. With no background in the industry. In an industry that is insular and decidedly male. No biggie.

Weaver didn't just create a niche brand that she could tell her grandchildren all about. In eight years she built, from scratch, a billion-dollar business. In this edition of This is Working the author of Love & Whiskey tells LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth about the power of relentless determination — how she learned to leverage being habitually underestimated into a strategic advantage and why patience is not only a virtue, but profitable.