#166: Durant Company Partner Rich Kleiman

This week on A Waste of Time with ItsTheReal, we welcome Kevin Durant's business partner and former VP of Roc Nation Sports Rich Kleiman back to his native Upper West Side! We discuss playing high school basketball around New York City, getting a scholarship to Boston University and immediately finding a different kind of sports interest which took him away from his studies, unceremoniously dropping out of school, moving back to NYC, briefly considering getting into the restaurant business, becoming COO of a dot-com bubble website, music supervising the ESPN docuseries The Life, producing the Jay-Z documentary Fade to Black, and ultimately being recruited to work for Jay at the inception of Roc Nation. Rich's story is one of overcoming long odds, believing in himself, outworking everyone else, finding his lane and dominating it, taking chances, getting co-signs from Heavy D, Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, and John Meneilly, and working with Mark Ronson, Q-Tip, J. Cole, Solange, Wale, Victor Cruz, Kevin Durant and on and on. All that plus asking Jay-Z for a raise, getting fired by Mark Ronson, walking around Soho with Amy Winehouse, what he saw in Meek Mill and his team, what Kevin Durant's free agency was really like, and so much more. This episode is an amazing listen, full of inspiration; take heed of how Rich, a man with no undergraduate degree, turned his unbelievable experiences around music and tv production and entrepreneurship into a master's degree in real life.