Starting a Company with No Plan, No Money, and No Clue

When Cory Mortensen started a company, he had no business plan, no investors, and no real idea what he was doing.

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A week earlier he had been camped on a beach in Croatia.  For the previous two years he had been living out of a backpack—cycling across the United States, wandering through South America, ran a marathon on Antarctica, and slowly making his way across Iceland, the UK, and Europe.

Business ownership was not part of the plan.  Then came a phone call.

His uncle had started a furniture company and needed someone to fly to China to inspect a shipment. Cory had never inspected furniture, never negotiated with factories, and had exactly zero experience in international trade.

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But the ticket was paid for.

So he went.

What followed was an accidental education in entrepreneurship: navigating Chinese factories, surviving disastrous partnerships, learning the strange rhythms of trade shows, and discovering that most businesses are held together with equal parts improvisation, stubbornness, and blind optimism.

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Against all odds and with more than a little luck, Cory eventually built EKHO into a multimillion-dollar company that would later be acquired by a national distributor.

I Wish You All the Luck in the World is not a book about perfect strategies or five-step formulas. It’s the story of what actually happens when someone starts a company the way most people do:

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without a map,

without a clue,

and figuring everything out along the way.