Source: Inc.com - Pro skateboarder Rob Dyrdek has built a business empire of more than a dozen ventures. They are all run out of the Fantasy Factory, his office near Los Angeles, which features an indoor skate plaza. Take a look inside America's coolest workplace.
Rob Dyrdek is always on the move. Which might make sense for a skateboarding icon comfortable with tricks called the nose blunt and crooked grind. But these days, the serial entrepreneur spends about as much time behind a desk. Or in a recording studio. Or in network pitch meetings. Or even jockeying a horse. As president of Dyrdek Enterprises, he's got his hands in at least a dozen ventures -- including the Rogue Status and DTA clothing lines, the ISX Instant Scoring eXperience, and Wild Grinders, the toy line based on his own childhood skate gang that he's now turning into an animated series. Next on the agenda? A professional skateboarding league -- what Dyrdek, perhaps the sport's most prominent ambassador today, says just may end up being his legacy. Keep in mind, he's 35.
Dyrdek's home each business day is known as the Fantasy Factory, a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in downtown Los Angeles equipped with an indoor skate plaza, 50-foot basketball hoops, a foam pit, and something called a T-Rex, a three-wheeled "superbike" he likes to whip around in.
It also serves as the backdrop for his reality show on MTV, now entering its third season. Each episode tends to center around a new project involving the company, with much of the action taking place upstairs in "Corpo," where his office staff works.
Dyrdek recently granted Inc. an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the Fantasy Factory, where he opened up about what drives him as an entrepreneur, the importance of authenticity in business, and why someone with more than 1 million friends and followers thinks social media is the most "overhyped" thing in media today.
