They walked hand in hand toward the hillside home in the bright afternoon sunshine. And as Ivan showed her how to enter the house with her keys, he looked forward to throwing more network parties and events with her. Eventually he would make love to her, and offer her everything that came with it, all while they continued to hustle. And with both of them together…who could ever stop them?

  Closing Interview:

  The Voice & Viewpoint

  AFTER BEGINNING another unprecedented year of gains at IDPromotions.com, while hinting at the desire to take the company public, Ivan David was able to sell his start-up website brand in the summer of 2007 for $180 million to Dortch Media Group in northern New Jersey. Included in the deal were company stock options, a salaried president of marketing and consultant position, and a commissioned sales agreement. Ivan also negotiated positions of continued employment for several of his staff members.

  After the deal was finalized, with payouts to Ivan’s key teammates in excess of $50 million, Thomas Jones advised him to break the story with the Voice & Viewpoint, the leading African-American newspaper in the San Diego region.

  “If I.D. Promotions is planning to focus on more of a national clientele now, then you got nothing to lose by not breaking the story with the Union-Tribune. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will still love you,” Thomas joked. “But the story would do a lot more locally to inspire the folks who read the black press by having you break that nine-figure deal on the front page of their paper. You know what I mean, Ivan? I’m proud to even know a young man like you my damn self.”

  He added, “Usually you’re reading about some shit like this going down somewhere else. Either that or some young athlete or rap star did the deal. But you’re a legitimate entrepreneur and businessman. That’s a different twist for us.”

  So Ivan agreed to the interview over lunch, back at his humble beginnings at Carol’s Soul Food Restaurant in Old Town.

  He arrived early in a pair of fine shoes, a casual beige sports jacket, and a purple tie with his white dress shirt and dark blue jeans. He sat down at a corner table toward the back to avoid too much traffic. But after two in the afternoon, many of the earlier customers had headed back to work as expected.

  “Hey, Ivan, what are you having?” one of the young waitresses asked him in her all-brown uniform of pants and a tennis shirt inscribed with CAROL’S SOUL FOOD RESTAURANT on the left.

  “Let me try that tuna casserole to keep things light,” he told her with a grin. He didn’t want to eat anything too heavy or complicated, knowing that he would be forced to talk a lot.

  “And your drink?”

  “Lemonade. And tell Carol I said hi back there.”

  The waitress smiled. “And you know she’ll come right out to see you before you leave, too.”

  As soon as his order was made, the Voice & Viewpoint reporter hurried through the door her cameraman held open for her. They spotted Ivan relaxed in his corner chair and hustled over to him.

  “Oh, my God! You haven’t been here long, have you?” the reporter asked him. She was a healthy-sized woman in her midthirties, wearing a lavender skirt suit. She inspected her watch. It was seven minutes after two. She said, “I know we’re just a little bit late, but I’m usually ahead of schedule.”

  Ivan smiled it off. “It’s all right. This place is like family. I’m good.”

  She nodded to him. “Okay, well, I’m Levonia Battle, and this is Nathan Clark, our first-rate photographer.”

  Nathan was an older black man with long gray dreads for hair. He kept his poise and nodded.

  “If you can, just try to imagine that I’m not even here, Ivan. But I will need to set up my light,” he commented.

  Ivan shrugged it off. “Do what you need to do.”

  Levonia sat across the table from him and pulled out her tape recorder and notepad. She turned the tape recorder on and took a deep breath.

  “Okay…so…Mr. Ivan David…”

  Ivan grinned and waited for her first question. She seemed to be a little unsettled.

  She shook her head and said, “Wow, I just…I mean, how does it feel?” She even leaned forward to lower her volume in the room. “A hundred and eighty million dollars? I’ve never even been around a person with that much money before.”

  Ivan told her, “Actually, you probably have, you just didn’t know it. This is San Diego. There’s plenty of money around here.”

  “Oh, well, yeah, walking by, but not sitting down to do an interview with me. So how does it feel?” she repeated. “I’m sure that a whole lot of us would just love to know.”

  Ivan answered, “Well, you know, when it first happens, you’re excited about it like anyone else would be. But once it’s over with, then you start to think to yourself, Okay, so what do I want to do next?”

  Levonia said, “You relax and enjoy yourself.”

  “Exactly,” Ivan agreed with her. “But I’m only thirty-two years old. How long do you expect me to relax?”

  “I know,” she told him. “That’s what makes it all the more special. You did it at such a young age.”

  Ivan said, “But that’s really how it happens, though. Once I started to read up and meet with other wealthy people, they all explained a zone that they fell in where things just took off. And you have to be ready for when it happens. My zone just came early.”

  “Yes, it did,” the reporter commented.

  By that time, Nathan was set up to take his first pictures.

  “So, how did you do it?” Levonia asked Ivan.

  “It’s really all about hooking up with the right people,” he answered.

  She immediately frowned at him. “I mean, really, how much of a cliché is that?” It had to be more than the who-you-know game.

  Ivan smiled and said, “It’s true though. I owe everything to the people I teamed up with. And some of the ideas were mine, but other ideas I listened to and went along with.”

  “Like what kind of ideas, specifically?”

  “Well, the I.D. Promotions idea I got from calling the Padres’ Emilio Alvarez E.A. So I plugged my initials in as I.D., and it just worked for me.”

  “So you just happened to have the perfect name, then.”

  Ivan shrugged. “Whatever works for you. But that’s the point. You never know what road will lead you there. And you can’t really follow behind other people. That’s their road. You gotta find your own way.”

  “Yeah, but how hard is that? Seriously.”

  “It’s as hard as you make it,” Ivan told her. “It would have been harder for me before I decided to just go for it. But before then, I wasn’t even trying. That’s how it is with a lot of us. We’re not trying. Or not trying to make it big. We just talk about it occasionally. But if you talk about it enough, then you need to start doing it.”

  Levonia looked him over and said, “You know, it always sounds so easy when successful people reflect. It’s almost like all the right things just seemed to happen for them all at the right time. I mean, you hear that movie producer Tyler Perry was once homeless, and then you look at him now and say, ‘But was he really homeless?’”

  Ivan said, “I bet he was. And I bet that when things started to happen for him, it all came together fast. But you work so hard that you don’t even have time to stop and notice it. That’s the zone I’m telling you about. But you have to want to be there to get there. And you gotta work for it.”

  She said, “Okay, now, I have to ask you this, Ivan. Since your company was doing so well so fast, then why sell it? Why not ride it all the way to the top? You could have made a billion dollars like Bob Johnson and BET.”

  Ivan nodded. He said, “That’s a good question. And what I realized was that IDPromotions.com was unique, but not as unique as BET. Bob Johnson had a very specific niche audience, and I had the same with marketing to San Diego. But once my company expands past S.D., I come into a very different world of competition. And where BET is still the only significant black television network on the market, once IDPromotions.com became a national company, there were thousands of other promotional websites to contend with. So I was able to maximize a sale of the company based on the numbers that we were doing locally and the numbers that we projected on the West Coast as a whole. In the meantime, I’m still connected to my brand, I still earn a significant salary, I maintain a very strong voice within the company, I acquired plenty of stock, and I get a chance to study how Dortch Media Group carries out business on the East Coast, with stock in their company.”

  Levonia heard all that and nodded back to him. “Wow. It sounds like you know what you’re doing, then.”

  Ivan smiled and told her, “Basically, I’m giving myself a chance to study the larger marketplace by freeing my hands. And as long as I stay smart and profitable with what I learn, I can always buy my company back on a good deal. That’s what big business and the stock market is all about. We’re all selling and buying. But sometimes when you get greedy without a plan, you can end up losing everything.”

  “And you obviously have a plan?” she asked him rhetorically.

  “Definitely,” Ivan answered. “With the fast run that I had here in S.D., I learned a great deal about a lot of things.”

  He paused for a minute as the waitress brought his casserole and lemonade to place on the table away from the tape recorder.

  “I’m sorry,” she commented to him.

  Ivan raised a hand and shook it off. “I’m good, you’re just doing your job. Besides, I’m hungry.”

  When the waitress walked away with a smile, Ivan took a bite and continued. “I learned a wealth of important business lessons here,” he stated. “And what I want to do now is study how all of those dynamics work on a larger scale around the nation, and then globally. How can you apply your business model in Chicago? New York? Africa? China? Brazil? I mean, it’s a pretty big world out there.”

  As Ivan dug into his plate of food, Levonia jotted down his points. She grinned and said, “Well, I guess, with all of that in mind, you pretty much do need to have your hands free.”

  Ivan nodded to her while eating. He mumbled, “The key is not to get stuck by earning only one type of money. That was the first lesson I learned. Expand your marketplace by any means necessary. So I expanded my website and small network parties to include nightclub branding, celebrity events, exotic car rentals, corporate business events, real estate, yacht parties, private jet travel, family vacation packages, U.S. military news. And each time you expand your interests, you end up meeting new businesspeople. That’s what led me to meet up with companies on the East Coast, including Dortch Media Group.”

  He added, “I’m even involved in promoting events at Native American reservations and casinos now.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that,” Levonia confirmed. “And if you’re talking about making global money like that, then you might have designs on becoming a billionaire soon anyway,” she suggested.

  She wanted to make her story as big as possible for her readers.

  Ivan stopped and stared at her, reading through her intentions. As a young African-American man who had become incredibly successful in his goals, he felt he had a responsibility to speak to those in the community who were still trying to find their way.

  So he stated, “If you really want it, anything is possible. But I don’t think a lot of people want it as bad as they say they do. If they did, they would make all the moves they need to make it happen. But once you start adding up excuses for not moving forward, you’ve already lost the game. And I’ve had a good run by surrounding myself with people who do what it takes. That’s what I spoke about earlier. It’s the people who you surround yourself with.”

  Levonia said, “Okay, but once you get all of that money, hundreds of millions of dollars…I mean, what do you do with all of that?”

  Ivan chuckled and said, “When I first started looking at checks with my company name on it, and they got bigger and bigger, it blew me away like that, too. But then you get used to it. And it allows you to take care of the immediate people around you so you can have the peace of mind to continue to do you. Then you end up with these countless opportunities on your mind. So you have to actually discipline yourself not to go crazy by trying to chase every rainbow.”

  “And do you get a lot of friends and family members asking you for hookups? I mean, I can just imagine,” Levonia commented with a grin.

  Even the photographer, who had been silently taking pictures in the background, was forced to smile at that one. After their article would hit the San Diego public, Nathan figured Ivan would have even more of a problem on his hands with all types of solicitations. He was brave to even do the interview.

  Ivan thought specifically about his decision to take care of his older brother and three nephews. He answered, “Well, unless you’re the last man on the planet, you’re always gonna have to deal with the less fortunate. So you figure out a way to do it in the most…peaceful way.” He laughed and said, “And sometimes you need the help of your lawyers to develop the safest and sanest way to do it.”

  “And what about your love life when you’re a multimillionaire?” Levonia asked him. She smiled and added, “You know I can’t let you go without asking you that.”

  Ivan thought about his long-standing relationship with Lucina Gallo, business and now personal. And he chose his words carefully.

  He said, “The best relationships for people who make big money are with other people who understand how to paddle in that canoe with you. In other words, if she don’t understand money, and don’t want to learn, then keep her safely separate from your business. But with people you wanna get serious with, you gotta make sure they’re in step with where you’re going.”

  Levonia read through his politically correct answer and followed up with, “Yeah, but what about you, Ivan? I understand the philosophy of the rich marrying the rich, but what woman has your nose open?”

  Ivan grinned and answered, “The same one who pulled it open in the beginning.” He laughed it off and said, “You’ll also learn that a lot of wealthy people are loyalists. Once we feel comfortable with a person, and the relationship is working well for us, we figure, why fuck it up? Especially when you’re talking about people who are close to us. So, unless someone else can take their place, you tend to keep coming back to the people you know.”

  “So even love is business with you?” Levonia asked him.

  Ivan didn’t hesitate. “Definitely,” he answered. “That’s why I’ve never made the mistake of getting hitched too early. I’ve seen what getting married and having kids early can do to people. And I’m not saying that it’s all bad, because it’s not. I know other people who have used family as a motivation to stay focused and busy. But I didn’t want that extra burden in my life before I felt I was ready to handle it.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  Ivan rocked back in his chair. “I’m almost ready.” Then he laughed again. He said, “But that’s a two-way street, so you both have to be ready for that next step, you know. But for right now, the immediate goal is becoming recognized as a global brand identifier.”

  Levonia stopped him and said, “Yeah, I’ve seen you talk about that before on your website blog. But could you explain what that means for our readers?”

  Ivan obliged. He said, “Basically, one of the biggest things I did learn from studying the Bob Johnson deal with BET is that it’s very hard to compete with big business by yourself. So Bob had a lot of deals going on even before he sold BET. With that in mind, you’ll find that the rich continue to get richer by buying other people’s companies. But that’s a hell of a risky game to play. And just a couple of bad moves can lose you billions of dollars. So instead of being the buyer, as a brand identifier, you become the finder of the next hot thing: Google, YouTube, Facebook. And if you can’t afford to invest in the company outright, then you do a marketing and promotions deal for a piece of the company and become wealthy that way.”

  Levonia commented, “Yeah, but it sounds like you would still need money to compete with that. It takes a lot to market a new brand.”

  Ivan countered, “Not necessarily. All you really need is a strong name and a desire to network. I’ve already been talking to my football and baseball friends about it. It’s the next level of endorsement. You use your name and popularity to make something else popular, and then you take it to the venture capitalists or the big deal makers and get your piece of the pie. That’s a way in which you keep your personal risk low while making money off the bigger deal.”

  He continued, “The only risk you take is choosing the right people, companies, and products to get involved with. The rapper 50 Cent did it with his interests in Vitamin Water, which ended up selling big to Coca-Cola. That made him a lot more money than just rapping and selling clothes. But when I do it, I’m not just thinking nationally, I’m out to identify hot new brands globally. I want to become the guy that the big money people can count on. And my partner…she’s set up to help me to do it,” Ivan added.

  “You’re talking about Lucina Gallo?”

  “Yes, I am. And she understands everything I’m doing now. So, instead of us getting involved in just the local parties, events, and concerts, we’re now conversing on international deals, while talking to all of the brands who want to be a part of it. That’s even the new way of using music now. It’s not about how the album sells anymore, it’s all about producing the big shows, and all of the tieins that come with a hit song. All we have to do is know who’s hot. And as Kanye West has continued to prove with his music, it’s not just a black or white thing. You gotta get out there and get everybody’s money. So you have to continue to create the kind of products and teamwork that you’ll need to compete in a more diverse market.”

  Levonia was impressed. Ivan was giving her more information than she had expected from him. She couldn’t even use that much information in a print article. She would have to link the rest of it to his website.