Diddy talks about his love for hip hop & multiple businesses.

Diddy talks about his love for hip hop & multiple businesses.

Diddy intro at InvestFest. It started on Diddy spoke about attending Howard University on a football scholarship but dropped out after two years to pursue a career in music.

Andre Harrell, the founder of Uptown Records, fired Sean “Puffy” Combs from his position as Uptown’s vice president of A&R in 1993. Puffy, at the time 23, started as an intern without a college degree; now, he was fired, working in the music business, a business he’s known since a teenager.

Uncompromising rule-breakers, throughout history, have always been terminated by someone or something. Puffy was a rule-breaker, a trouble-magnet, or a playmaker, depending on who you asked. Luckily, in this story, termination set the young executive free to focus on establishing Bad Boy Records—a rap and R&B label made in his image. In November of 1994, the non-sleeping, youth-driven mogul-in-the-making, after a year in operation and removed from Uptown, was spotlighted by the New York Times.

After five years in operation, with over $130 million in annual sales.