How Kevin McGovern Built 6 Global Companies & Scaled Billion-Dollar Ventures

What does it take to co-found 6 global leaders and scale dozens of ventures across 80+ countries?

Discover how Kevin McGovern, Chairman of McGovern Capital, helped co-found 6 global category leaders and scale ventures to over $1 billion in revenue. In this fireside chat at the Family Office Club, Kevin shares real insights on building billion-dollar companies, sourcing high-quality deals, leveraging global joint ventures, and investing with purpose.

With over 25 companies co-founded and business done in 80+ countries, Kevin offers rare lessons on capital raising, licensing, family office dealmaking, and creating impact-driven legacies.

💡 Topics Covered:

1. Scaling from startup to billion-dollar exits
2. Joint venture & licensing strategies that work
3. How to spot game-changing global trends early
4. Why mission-driven investing is the future
5. Kevin’s “Catch the Current, Make the Wave” philosophy

🎙️ Interview by Richard C. Wilson | Family Office Club

🔗 Learn more: https://FamilyOffices.com

https://familyoffices.com/

Transcript

Kevin is the chairman and CEO of McGovern Capital, a single family office, which
serves as an investment strategy and licensing principle and advisor to global
businesses. Through McGovern Capital and its affiliates, Kevin has co -founded over 25
companies, six of which have become world category leaders, and he's been principal
in over 15 global joint ventures doing business in over 80 countries.
One of the reasons we are having Kevin on stage today is just that he has helped
found and scale a few companies over a billion dollars in revenue, like I think
Sophie Beverage was one of those. And so I'll take the other mic now, Kevin,
but if you want to explain anything else about your bio, you want to add for
context as I get seated, that'd be great. So what else about your bio or background
would you like to share with the room that maybe I didn't mention when introducing
you? - Well, my hidden tool is my son and the team that I have and my family.
I have a truly entrepreneurial family and they really, really understand dad's gotta
have his thing and travels quite a bit. And I always love to tell people that the
first priority of my life is But, you know, really, I think of the companies that
I'm involved with as, in some ways, children. And, you know, I have an extended
family. I never forget asking Jim Draper, "How many kids do you have?" And he said,
"Four." I said, "No, how many kids do you have?" And he had 700. And so, anyway,
I've had a lot of children, and I really enjoy working with entrepreneurs in a big
>> Awesome. We had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Draper for billionaires .com.
We'll try to get him on stage one day here as well. How have you done multiple
billion -dollar plus deals while others are rightfully proud of doing a million or 10
million -dollar size deals? What's the number one difference maker if you could maybe
spill the beans on that? >> When you're assessing an opportunity, large opportunities
are not necessarily more complex than small opportunities. And we always want to look
at things and say, is this a trend or is it a fact? We have an expression in the
government capital called catch the current, make the wave. If the wave is existing
already, it's too late. And people sometimes ask me, who are your leaders and idols
right on top of being one of them. But Wayne Gretzky, we skate to where the puck
will be. And what's happening today, what's hot today is too late for you to do.
What you need to do is you need to figure out what's happening tomorrow, because
it's going to take you time to get there. So really look at things that are
compelling, trendy, and also what you can do to shortcut the skate to where the
puck will be. Yeah, Awesome. I think Gary Vee says something similar that like if
you're always chasing that recent trend You just be behind the herd so you need to
focus on Future sandbox and spend a decade building that so when the herd comes
you're already very well positioned in that space I don't know how to say no to
Richard. I mean, you know Often what I'll do is instead of just saying absolutely
no I'll try to refer people to people that may understand it more but for me, You
know we have a series of gurus. I teach quite a bit as you know a Cornell and
MIT in Stanford And I don't just take the students are just one thing the
professors great resources for gurus They're not necessarily entrepreneurs, but they're
great fact finders and a great Information people so I use them quite a bit. So I
know you have an amazing network One of the biggest ones probably in this room So
how much is the teaching and doing executive education or business courses does that
get you hyper connected to a lot of these families or how did you build such a
family? You know my son says dad why are you with all these family office
conferences? You know we got companies to run we got this we got that and I said
I meet people like you and like the people in this audience and quite frankly when
I speak at family offices or I speak at universities it gets me into sovereign
funds. It gets me into that. You know, I teach at Cal State in Saudi Arabia and
that's a great entree into the hierarchy of BIF in Saudi.
Right, great. So you said seven months ago on stage that all of business is pattern
matching, right? Something's working. You do 10 times more of it. It's not working.
Maybe you try to fix it once or twice and then you delete it, right? So can you
talk a little bit more about that? How you stay objective? Because sometimes if you
put a lot of energy into something, you kind of almost emotionally have this like
kind of sunk cost, but you're kind of tied to it sometimes. So how do you stay
objective on cutting things out and going 10x on what's working? Buffett has some
great expressions. Some I agree with, some I don't. He's a lot smarter than I'll
ever be. But the one I really like the most is cut your losers early and ride
your winners. And you know, it's really not easy, but you have to learn whether
it's people that are in your life, whether it's investments, et cetera, you have to
learn how to cut your losers early. And in business, it's the same way.
And why do your winners, when you have a winner, keep investing in it, keep pushing
it hard, keep doubling up, tripling up, et cetera. As you know, I'm involved in one
company It's a replacement for all plastics. I've written three checks and I have
soft equity, hard equity, I am pumping it. I am putting money in, et cetera.
I'm really, you know, I'm pumping my winners. It's very simple. - Right, got it. So
how do you get an audience with some of these groups that turned into billion
dollar brands? Were they so small when you approached them? It was easy? Or were
they already big and kind of the hot thing and had everybody trying to partner with
them? - Your reputation is everything. So fortunately we built a reputation.
We vet our deals and there's not a chance that I'll bring a deal to somebody in
Singapore or we do a lot of business in Asia, in the Middle East, not a chance.
If I see a slight dent, they're the first people to know about it. Our reputation
is much more important than our balance sheet. and I know you've heard it a hundred
times, but some people live by it and some people don't. So I'm really into,
when I tell people about a deal, I'll tell them the words that are involved and
the hairs that are involved, and they both trust with me, 'cause they know that I'm
gonna tell you everything that I know about it. And I'll vet it first and I won't
waste your time. - How much in -person due diligence, how many months of due
diligence does that look like before you start in it to some of your close
partners? - We're slower than most. I remember the old dot com area, make a decision
today. Sorry, we're not making a decision today. We take longer and as far as we're
concerned, you know, we wanna make sure that we are really confident and if somebody
wants to rush us, we just say no and we move on. The real people realize that we
can bring a lot more to the table than capital and So we take our time and we do
our due diligence carefully and we go to people that are a lot smarter than we are
about different categories and we iterate. I chaired Science at Cornell as a trustee
and scientists love that word. You tell them in your conversation, iterate and they
go, yeah, he knows what he's doing. Iteration is, you know, all these different
points and find a straight line. So iterate on your deals, check it out with a
number of people, and listen to all these people, and you'll form your straight line
about your opportunity. Got it. Great. What about any tricks on getting a hold of
sovereign wealth funds, billion -dollar plus family offices, publicly traded companies?
That's something that could be life -changing if someone in here just gets a joint
venture with one publicly traded company? When you meet people, don't worry about
their business. Worry about their person. Find out a little bit about how many
children they have. Find out about what they really love. And you know what?
You build a relationship. You know, the number two guy at PIF when he came to
Miami for the tennis tournament said, "Justine and I would love you to come up and
enjoy tennis together." Singapore, when the head guy at the tennis act,
when His daughter went to school at NYU. His wife, Su -Fong, gave my phone number
in case of emergency. I'm not bragging, but they trust me. And the personal
relationship-- learn the secretary's name, the wife's name, the children's name,
and the dog's name. And when you start out the conversation, don't ask how their
business is doing. Ask how their family is doing. How is your wife Julie doing? How
is your family doing and learn to be personal with people. It really, really makes
a difference. You seem to be naturally pretty good at that. Do you keep organized
notes on some of these details or do you have a really good memory for it? Both.
I have notes on, you know, I really do keep notes carefully and I want to remember
the personal side. And there's no way, Richard, you're gonna remember it all. And
so, before I go to a different country, et cetera, I check my notes and I check
the people that I meet with and I remember their children's names, et cetera. - Yes.
- Got it.
- I forgot the whole concept is, you've already talked about it,
relationships, relationships, relationships. - Right? - Great, yeah, for sure. So what's
the most painful, costly lesson that you wanna kinda get into everybody's head's here
today so they don't have to learn it the hard way that you've not mentioned yet.
You know what, my worst experience was a company that allowed the entrepreneur to
hire the financial people and then they tried to hire the accountants and you got
to know your numbers and you got to be familiar with your numbers and as an
investor make sure that you have a very close contact with the people that cover
the purse. And so I don't want to meet just the CEO. I want to meet the CFO,
and I want to meet the individual team members on an individual basis. And I want
to make sure that I know that those numbers are being prepared by the team and not
just by the CEO. I did get further a little bit on this particular company,
and I wound up having to go in, fire the CFO, and work with the CEO as best I
could, even though I wanted to get rid of them. And about a week before closing, I
found somebody to buy the company. It was one of my worst chapters. And I called
the CEO of the other company. I said, I just fired the CEO. He was putting the
guns in my head about it. He said, I'm so happy. We're going to fire them the day
after closing. That was a close call. and what we'll tell you, do the right thing
and it will pay off and it will work out. - Got it. So when people approach you,
and since you speak so often, you probably have lots of emails coming in all the
time, pitches, if it's not through a referral and not an name you recognize, what
stands out to you, what do you notice first, look at first, any suggestions on
that? - Referral, you know, I used to hate it when I was, I was a deals lawyer in
Venice, Connecticut, and they used to hate that all these venture capitalists was
like a hell, hell club that they only dealt with each other. But you know what?
The person who refers it to me is really important to me. Really important. Because
I know that my dear friends, just like I, I will not refer to Richard or somebody
unless I've edited carefully. And to be honest with it, as many days in a year,
and you just don't have time to look at things called Turkey. And So you need to
know what categories you're good at, as you talked about yesterday, and what
categories you're not good at. We're not good at software. I don't believe that
much. I think software is very difficult to have a sustainable business in. Everybody
has a different opinion. I like hardcore. What we do is engage in disruptive and
typically patented technologies that have a global need. We wanna make sure that we
have some proprietary rights, and that we can really execute based on those
proprietary rights into a joint venture or otherwise. Got it. What are some of the
trends that you're tracking now, if you don't mind sharing that you can say
publicly, that you're really most excited about it? So you've seen me reach into my
left pocket, but I got to tell you something. If you're an entrepreneur and you're
not carrying your product with you, or you're not spending half your time thinking
about your product, You're the wrong person for that company. I tell people, you've
got to have a CPO in a company. And they say, what's a CPO? I say, Chief Passion
Officer. The person who's blind, have the right reasonable people surround him.
So this is substitute for plastics. It's going extremely well. It's made from
sugarcane waste. And Walmart is using it for poop bags to start, because you can
flush it. Subway is using it for sandwich, because you can put it in your
dishwasher and it's sugar in the water. Amazon is using it for shrink wrap. And now
my job, I'm Chief of International Strategy from Houston Ideals, is to bring it
around the world. The other ones we're working on is we have a complete treatment
for air conditioning gas, and it cuts your electrical bill by 20 to 50%.
Next, we're working on a hydrogen box. You literally contain it in a suitcase. And
The Pentagon called me on that one, and I'm working on the commercialization of it.
And last, we're working on the rare earth. And I'll be in Korea in June, as I
told you. Announcing a pretty big deal with Vietnam. The rare earth is so important
to this country. Also, we've got to be a patriot, Richard. This is so needed for
this country. So work on deals that you truly feel your heart, as well as your
brain, can be involved in. And if you see me on a plane, Richard, and you don't
see some articles about what I'm working on in my briefcase or am I you're not
gonna see me that way. I'm always reading about my categories and trying to figure
out what's going on in that vertical. What's good and what's bad. Yeah, interesting.
Sometimes while we're running this investor club we see some things and I think that
is unbelievable and that's gonna be worth a hundred million dollars or it's totally
untrue and fake and it's gonna be a waste of my time. One or the other, right?
It's gonna be binary. Can you talk about that for a second? If you do diligence
and you know more about that market than your entrepreneur, they got a problem and
X marks the spot. And I love the CEO who says, "I don't know the numbers, but my
CFO does. See you later, folks." You know, I told you Richard a couple times,
"Life is pattern recognition." Okay? If your spouse is frowning, correct it.
If your spouse is smiling, do it more, okay? Whatever the hell it is,
okay? If you gotta know your numbers, I tell people,
if you're gonna be in Spain for the next 30 years, you better learn Spanish. If
you're gonna be in business for the next 30 years, you better as hell learn
accounting, okay? And you gotta know your numbers and you gotta have a dashboard and
a CEO that doesn't know what's going on with his or her business on a daily, if
not weekly basis is going to lose. It's like a ship. It slightly goes off.
You can correct it. It goes way off. You've got a real problem. So you've got to
know you've got a pattern recognition is so important. For sure. What's a million
dollar insight that has nothing to do with what we've said so far in this
interview? They would provide massive value to investors here in the room. I wrote
down a couple of them, but probably the most important one is pillow partners.
If your entrepreneur gets home on a Saturday night at 8 o 'clock, which they should
expect to do, and that pillow partner says, keep going, we have a piece of the
rock, we love the CEO, everything's cool, and go for it, honey, you got a winning
company. When that entrepreneur gets home at 8 o 'clock on a Saturday night. Why are
you working for that jerk? What's in it for you? You have a losing company. Second
of all, some of the companies that I've been involved with have been absolute rocket
chips. We have co -founded six -category world leaders, not one. Soby was my first.
Yes, skincare was our biggest. We brought AHAs to the world in 80 countries.
But the bottom line is you have to learn to plateau a little bit. I know micro
velocity is important. I got it, okay? But you also need to know when you're going
like this, you need to know when to go like that for a short period of time. I
said to my partner in plastic this past week, "Vinny, we need to plateau." The
orders are piling in. We're building a 250 ,000 square foot facility in Florida.
We're on -shoring, et cetera. But we've got to now consolidate what we're doing
because we've got to understand where where's our next plateau? And keep adjusting
that business plan each plateau. You can get lost in it and sometimes that rocket
ship that's going mad on and it starts flaking off scales, you're going to lose,
you're on thin ice. And one thing you need all the time is cash is fuel. So make
sure you have plenty of cash. And if we oversubscribed on a round day in the last
two weeks, okay? I said, "Vinnie, take a little bit more." Okay, make sure you got
the fuel for that rocket ship. You never really have enough. I remember the old
survey days We're about 18 % that was really tough on the cash flow But we had to
do we had to do so make sure you have a lot of fuel for that rocket ship Was
there another million -dollar insight that you want to share at the room that you
wrote down a bullet point or two? Let me just say sure. I take your time
Well, I will tell you I will tell you that the old expression, this is not new,
missionaries versus mercenaries. But what I tell entrepreneurs, especially young
entrepreneurs, don't drink your Kool -Aid. When you raise a million dollars on a 20
million dollar, that doesn't mean you work 20 million. Stop, okay? Make sure you
understand that the only time that you're really drinking it is at a closing when
to check is being passed and wired funds. Don't drink your Kool -Aid. And you know
what, I have to-- this is the most important message of the day, at least for
mine. We're going to model, in our family office, catch the current make the wave.
We've been involved in a lot of different trends. But we've changed a little bit,
maybe because I'm a little older, OK? And I heard this from somebody else.
And All of you with this great net worth out here, I want you to listen to two
words, and I didn't make it up. What our motto now is, is success to significance.
So everything we do, we try to impact mankind as well as our balance sheet.
So take two things that really will impact people, not just your company,
your community, your country, and your globe. - You just find that you're genuinely
more passionate, excited about that, and then everyone you talk to is more excited
because of the good cause, or what, is there anything else you wanna add to that
on what made that big change? - Just on joint ventures, you asked me, what do you
do about joint ventures? The first joint venture situation I set up was for the
doctors who to alpha hydroxy acids, the women here would know what it is, but men
have no idea what I'm talking about. I brought it to 80 countries, and it was in
40 % of all skin care products in the world. But what I did for the doctors is I
said, they said, "Where are you going to bring it? What are you going to do?" I'm
going to say, "I'm going to create a chart, channels of distribution, areas of
distribution, and applications. What we're going to do is we're going to organically
generate capital through licenses and joint ventures. Often you don't need to go to
investors. Think about what multiple applications you have for your product. The only
one I always talk about in classes, sell the pet business, okay? Nowadays the pet
business is so big, maybe that's what it lasts when you do, but give away a
category, give away a license in a category that you don't feel is so essential and
build your capital that way non -dinitively. So, we've done that over and over again,
and that's what I teach you to all these different schools. They call it the
McGovern Grid, is break up your applications, your products, and your areas of
distribution, and find out where you can have organically generated capital. Right.
I think that's an amazing advice because you need to figure out the business model
anyways, so getting revenue acceleration, spending your energy on that versus raising
capital, and now you lost part of your company. money. The other thing I see often
is people raising way too much money. I know you need to raise enough to have cash
flow, but they say, "Oh, I need to raise $20 million." It's like, "Well, do you
need $20 million now?" Like, "No, you only need $2 to $3 million now, and you can
raise later to higher valuation." I love these early -stage businesses. They have a
$20 million valuation. I say, "Raise your couple million, get going, and then start
raising your valuation realistically." Right? Right. You know, break it in pieces,
some milestones, stones, whatever it is. Right, for sure. What about when it comes
to setting up the joint ventures, you've negotiated a lot of these, you've probably
learned things to do and not do, what are one or two components that are kind of
black belt level deal negotiation terms that would help people here in the room?
Define the field. Break it apart into different applications, as I said, but make
sure when you're giving a license to somebody that you define what field it is. You
know, In other words, if they're only working in two countries, don't give them five
countries, give them the two countries. I did a deal with Avon and I said, where
are you gonna watch this and where are you gonna bring it? Must stage it, okay?
But another one that people don't think about, Richard, and it really is important.
When you give a non -exclusivity to somebody, you can't give exclusivity to anybody
else. So be really careful, I call it white whales. I say we have to wait to
bring it to the white whales, okay? And what the white whales are are the global
companies. And you cannot, you cannot bring it to a global company if you've given
away segments of the world. So sometimes you got to be a little bit more patient,
particularly with patented technologies. You got to be a little bit more patient and
wait it so you can go to a L 'Oreal or you can go to an Apple or Microsoft and
give them the world as large an applications as possible. So be very careful.
Non -exclusive opportunities can really hurt you, believe it or not. Right, makes
sense. One of my mentors, Sergeant Thomas, has raised over a billion dollars in
private equity and he mentored me really early on in the industry. And so one of
our latest VIP data AI tools is a billion dollar plus partner AI tool. We took all
of our data and narrowed it to billion -dollar -plus balance sheet companies, corporate
venture capital, publicly traded, etc. And so we have that now in the portal for
those that want to use it. But my question is related to what tips do you have
for actually landing those, finding those, getting their attention? You know what it's
like to get pitched all the time. Obviously, you work through referrals, you have a
big network, but what other strategies could you give people here in the room
related to that? Know the person on the other side of the call or the visit,
prepare and figure out where, where, or how we'll be. Give you an example.
We started out with this plastic deal talking to huge family offices in Latin
America, etc. Then we had a conversation with a plastic manufacturer in Saudi.
Within 15 minutes, he got it. The family office was very very nice,
you know, they're very powerful, but they needed to really understand it, how we're
going to distribute it, et cetera. That plastic manufacturer, when you tell you
something, he got it in an instant. Tell me what the deal is, forget about it, I
got it completely. So you really need to assess who is the person you're talking to
and what are their buttons and why they would be more efficient for you to deal
with them. So now I'm dealing with plastic manufacturers around the world as opposed
to, in some cases, family offices, but more plastic manufacturers. By the way, that
love yourself, we can make the resin and substitute it for all plastic manufacturing.
So we don't break up the supply chain, which is huge. And all these manufacturers
are really worried. Single -use banner in plastics is now in 35 countries and it's
going all over the world. So those people are really worried about their business
and petroleum is the pva. That's in all your plastics We replaced that petroleum
with sugarcane waste Right I think is as more people learn that we all have a
credit card worth of plastic inside of our bodies and micro and nanoplastics I think
that a credit card company in the world is in Texas and they're talking about
making their plastic cards from our Sugarcane waste awesome. Yeah, that's great.
So You know, unique from everything else we've covered so far, what's so powerful
that if you are known for something in business or a skill or capability, what
would be like the one superpower you would say you've developed that others could
aspire to here in the room?
Did he make a difference? When he was here, did he make a difference and was he
respected by people all over the world?
That's it. That's it. Period. Respect and make a difference in your life.
One individual, ten individuals, a man individuals. Make a difference. One of my
favorite, if I may Richard, if I have two seconds more, I was speaking at Cornell
Med School. I'm very active at Cornell. I love Cornell. They gave me a full
scholarship and I would forget it. And they had an interview with me and then I
spoke. And then this young man walked up and he said, you know, I had a youth
like you. My dad died at 11, my mother was handicapped, I had three jobs when I
was 12, 13. He said, I had a background like you, and he said,
I really love hearing about it, but I'm not an Ivy like you people, you know,
whatever. And I said, what are you doing here? He says, I'm a postdoc, postdoc and
you're not worried about whether you're an Ivy nut, who cares? Okay, so I looked at
him and I said, You don't look down on everybody, do you?
What do you mean? Look down. I said, the more you carry, the stronger you get.
You don't look down on him, do you? He smiled. The more you carry, the stronger
you get. So don't think about what you don't have. Don't think about your past.
Think about today and to be proud of who you are and what you've accomplished.
- Awesome. So my last question is related to, I often tell investors and anyone
raising capital, if you can source deals first exclusively and at a better valuation,
your balance sheet will probably compound. And investors wanna see that people they
invest in are sourcing things exclusively and at better valuations, usually. So you
teach, you speak at events, you have a reputation. Is there anything else related to
sourcing these types of exciting deals first or anything related to sourcing deals
and opportunities they want to share with the room? One of our I guess special
sources is that we really can bring you around the world and entrepreneurs nowadays
I mean I used to lecture on behalf of Arthur Anderson on joint ventures and I used
to say that company and career knows what you're up to so make sure you understand
that you got to keep improving yourself. So when we talk to people, we say, we're
not only going to help you grow your company, we're going to bring you around the
world. And we can do it, and we have done it. And let us show you what we've
done, and let us show you what we can do for you. And that's very appealing. So
that's sort of like a special sauce, if you will, is that we truly are
international, and we truly can bring it to a lot of places in the world that a
lot of entrepreneurs don't have any access to. Great. Yeah, my takeaway from that is
that when you show strategic value you can provide to others Then they're motivated
to show you deals first and if they know what that expertise is They'll know when
the right pattern is like oh, this is a great deal Maybe for Kevin. Let me refer
to Kevin and if you come to mine first Then you get to see the the sugar cane
glove maybe before the other family office who would love to have Helped on the
deal, but you're known to be strategically super helpful Example I got a call eight,
four weeks ago from Pentagon. And he said, we have a technology that we're bringing
into the military, but we promise to help them with commercial and you're the guy.
So meet this person and he had an amazing technology. But I'm getting the whole,
thank God, maybe in 20 years I'll get to know even more as a person that can
commercial, I think, on a global scale. - Awesome. Is there anything in your notes
there you wanted to share before
You know I have so many you know different little things, but you know I got to
tell you something when I when I do go around the world the thing that I love
most is to meet really Successful people because most of them are more grounded in
than a lot of people think we are all so human and We learn about the world and
ourselves we realize that we all are children of God and you know what, when you're
talking to people, don't look up and don't, you know, be in awe.
They're human beings just like you, and treat them like a human being. And believe
me, your relationships will really grow that much more. So, you know, at the only
get the wiser you get, okay, but at the same time, understand that, you know, we're
all striving to do something different, et cetera, et cetera, but we're also human
to Richard. Awesome. Great. Thank you. Let's give Kevin a big round of applause.
Thank you.