David Mullings mapped out his life in five-year blocks as a teenager in Kingston. Six ventures, one pandemic, sixty-seven staples, and a one-way ticket to Jamaica later, he is still on schedule.
Key Takeaways
- David P.A. Mullings founded Blue Mahoe Holdings after watching Caribbean culture move the world for decades while the capital generated by that movement flowed everywhere except back to the region.
- It launched Blue Mahoe Capital which is the first US-based company in history to receive SEC qualification to raise capital from Non-Accredited Investors specifically for Caribbean investment, and has now reserved the NASDAQ ticker symbol IRIE.
- Mullings started the first version of the company with US$15,000 pooled from himself, his brother, his parents, and two friends in 2018, and has never lost the conviction that a Black-owned Berkshire Hathaway for the Caribbean is not only possible but inevitable.
Mullings Wrote His Life Plan at Fifteen and Has Been Executing It Ever Since
In 1996, David P.A. Mullings finished high school in Kingston at fifteen years old and sat down to write out the next fifteen years of his life, knowing what he would want to do after age 50. He also decided that whoever he married couldn’t change the plan but could help to write the plan from age 30 to 50. Not a vague wish list. A plan, broken into five-year blocks, based on what he would do after fifty.
His father, Dr. Anthony Mullings, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies medical school, had been training him for this kind of thinking since age eight. He would clip a lavalier microphone to his sons, have them read Michael Manley speeches and the Bible, record them, and play the recordings back.
“If you’re going to be leaders of people, you need to be able to speak publicly.”
The household produced a specific kind of person. By twenty-two, Mullings had completed his MBA at the University of Miami, one of the youngest graduates in the school’s history. Competitive football for Real Mona F.C., Caribbean outreach coordinator for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in Florida. Toured with Sean Paul and T.O.K. Met President Barack Obama and got him to sign a 50th independence birthday card for Jamaica.
He was building businesses since September 2001 during the first semester of his MBA programme with his brother Robert. Several of them failed but he gained experience with each attempt.
The RealVibes Failure Taught Him That Visibility Is Not the Same as Profitability
The failure Mullings talks about most is RealVibes, the website he launched with his brother Robert that became the largest platform for Caribbean music videos on the web.
In 2003, they had branded a Honda Civic hatchback in South Florida to promote the website, took it to a car casting call for 2 Fast 2 Furious, convinced director John Singleton to add them as extras, and negotiated for the right to take behind-the-scenes photos to publish. They met Ludacris and Paul Walker. The 117 exclusive photos secured an article on IGN.com with 3 photos and a link driving traffic to their site to see the rest.
The traffic came. The advertisers and investors did not.
The first bandwidth bill hit Robert’s American Express card for four thousand dollars. The second for six thousand. In the third month, the server company called on August 3rd to say they had already hit their monthly maximum. His brother Robert said three words.
“Plug it out.”
They shut the server down and closed the website for six months.
“We thought visibility would lead to credibility. And then investors and advertisers. If the people with money do not understand it, you’re going to scale while losing money.”
In 2008, RealVibes signed an agreement to becomeYouTube’s first-ever Caribbean media partner, allowing them to earn revenue from posted videos and authorize other channels to earn revenue. The investment capital in the way that they expected. The perception problem was still there. The capital that could change the region was still going elsewhere.
His largest investor, Richard M. Powell, told him that startups have a 99% chance of failing and that it was easier to raise money to buy a profitable existing business that you understand and forced him to study Warren Buffett by reading every letter written to BerkshireHathaway shareholders and discuss them with him. Richard pushed David to study private equity and investing.
Blue Mahoe Capital Was Born from a Presentation at the Jamaica Stock Exchange and a conversation with Joe Matalon
In January 2014, David was invited by Dr. Marlene Street-Forrest, then the Managing Director of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, to present on the topic of how to get the Jamaican Diaspora to invest in Jamaica, not just send remittances and donations. 4 years later while working on a deal with Joe Matalon, he was asked why he had not launched what he pitched at the event. David pointed out that he never pitched, he just explained what people like Joe needed to launch for people like him to invest in. Joe said that David was the right person to launch it because Jamaicans knew him, he had worked in finance in Jamaica, in finance in the USA and had served on the Jamaican Diaspora Advisory Board. Joe chose the name “Blue Mahoe” because it was Jamaican without being blatantly Jamaican. Blue Mahoe Holdings and Blue Mahoe Capital took years to reach the structure it now has. The original vision, build “a Caribbean BerkshireHathaway”, a publicly-traded vehicle that was easy for retail investors to invest in and get access to a select portfolio of public and private Caribbean companies, ran into securities regulations that made it legally impossible to raise from Retail investors before a listing. He pivoted to setup an ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund). A year and a half of legal fees later, his ETF advisors confirmed the structure could be built, the portfolio was possible but they had a regulatory hurdle that could not be overcome if the right kind of partner was not found. Everyone said no because the Caribbean was too small and not worth the expense.
He returned to the original plan and restructured things around what the law would allow. Private credit. Real estate. Other money buying the public equities and making private equity investments. Starting in Jamaica and The Bahamas with Barbados and Guyana to follow.
The lowest point came on a June 2019 Friday evening in Orlando when his wife Kathryn told him that she could not keep doing this. One month good, next month a big struggle. Commitments from investors who had signed paperwork and then disappeared. She needed stability because they had 3 young children. She gave him a deadline: raise what you need by August, or get a regular job and Blue Mahoe becomes a side hustle.
The next morning he drove from Orlando to West Palm Beach to see his parents, taking the back roads of 441, quiet, green around him. He made the one call he had never wanted to make. He messaged Aubyn Hill and asked for a meeting with Jamaican-Canadian billionaire Michael Lee-Chin whom David had met once before but did not have a direct contact for. Not for money. For a conversation.
Aubyn asked the details and then messaged him back that afternoon. Lee-Chin would meet one on one with him on Tuesday morning at 9am. Could he be there?
He booked a one-way ticket to Jamaica. He only had enough in his account for that. His parents still had the house in Kingston. If the meeting did not work, he would call and ask them to wire the return fare.
“We prayed the night before. We prayed the morning of the meeting.”
That June 11, 2019 meeting lasted less than the scheduled hour but changed his life. Lee-Chin told Mullings that they were 30 years apart, both born in January. He said he would help because they were both Warren Buffett disciples. He said Mullings would have more impact than him and be worth more than him. He told him that David had one advantage that Lee-Chin never had but David said that he had two and Lee-Chin asked which two: David confidently answered that he now has a mentor who would help him avoid the same mistakes Lee-Chin had made, and the internet, which meant he would never have to cold call or knock on a door like Lee-Chin did when he built his mutual fund business that sold investments to Retail investors..
At the end of the meeting, Lee-Chin told David to go outside the office and tell his parents exactly what he had committed to do. Mullings stepped outside and called his parents to relay the message. The next morning at 7am, his phone rang. His parents were calling. His mother said:.
“If he believes that much in you, who are we to doubt you? Check your bank account and call Kathryn. Just run. We will catch you if you fall.”
They had wired enough money into his account to give him a 6-month runway.
Building the Company Cost Mullings His Appendix, His Right Colon, and Sixty-Seven Metal Staples
The cost of building Blue Mahoe Capital was not only financial.
At age thirty-nine 5 months before his fateful Lee-Chin meeting, Mullings was rushed to the the hospital with a sharp abdominal pain that was thought to be appendicitis but turned out to be a tumour that had grown from his appendix into his colon. Surgeons removed his appendix and his right colon. Sixty-seven metal staples closed a wound running from his chest to his pelvis. He spent 10 days in hospital,five of those days waiting on results to find out whether he would need chemotherapy or radiation treatment. 2 more weeks in bed and 6 weeks of recovery then quarterly visits to an oncologist
It was a benign tumour, not malignant. He went back to building but with more intention and an appreciation for his mortality.
“I was on a hospital bed and I wondered, is this really it? I didn’t think about the failed ventures. I thought about the things I never tried and why. Was it really because I was afraid of what some people were going to say?”
The scar is still visible each time he removes his shirt at the football field. His fourteen-year-old son Luke suggested tattooing two jagged lines on either side of it so that when strangers ask what happened, he can say he got into a fight with Wolverine.
Mullings has not done it yet. His pain tolerance, he says, is not that high. He did get a tattoo of the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda games on his right shoulder though.
Blue Mahoe Capital is the First US-Based Company to Receive SEC Qualification to Raise Capital for Caribbean Investment from Non-Accredited Investors
Blue Mahoe Capital was the first US-based company in history to receive SEC qualification for an offering to raise capital from Non-Accredited investors specifically for Caribbean investment. Retail investors now had access. The shares are $10 each, accessible to any US Person and the company can generally solicit, not only from Accredited Investors, the rich 1%. The NASDAQ ticker symbol IRIE has been reserved and the goal is to be the first listed company on a major stock exchange focused on the Caribbean.
The company began with $15,000 pooled from Mullings, his brother Robert, his parents, and two friends in 2018. Today it focuses on real estate in phase 1, starting with affordable housing in Jamaica, where the National Housing Trust has seventy thousand (70,000) qualified buyers and Jamaica is building fewer than four thousand (4,000) homes per year.
“There’s no ETF for the Caribbean, no mutual fund for the Caribbean, no public company for the Caribbean that is listed on a major international exchange and giving broad access to the region. People want to invest in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean is poised for growth. The general Caribbean Diaspora has been ignored as a source of investment capital at scale. Only the rich were given access. We finally change that.”
The long-term vision is a Black-owned Berkshire Hathaway, a listed investment firm that pools diaspora capital and institutional capital to invest in a region historically overlooked and now under threat from climate forces they had little contribution to creating. When the NASDAQ listing is completed, Blue Mahoe Capital would become one of only seven Black-owned companies on a major US stock exchange.
Mullings Says the Caribbean Consistently Undersells Itself Because of Mental Slavery, Not Lack of Ability
Mullings has been making the case for years that Jamaica could be the Singapore of the Western Hemisphere, a comparison he uses with non-Caribbean investors as a shortcut to help them see the potential that he already sees every day.
He is direct about why the Caribbean undersells itself:
“We have not emancipated ourselves from mental slavery. We believe what the colonizers taught us about ourselves. We punch above our weight at home and everywhere we go. So how is it that at home we don’t believe we can do this specific thing of building a clean, safe, business-friendly and efficient society?”
He points to the Caribbean diaspora as the most underutilized financial resource for investment capital in the region. Jamaica alone has three million people in the diaspora sending back US$3.3 billion per year in remittances. Most of it goes to family, not investment, because no regulated Caribbean investment vehicle exists in the countries where the diaspora lives that makes it as easy as buying shares of Google or Apple.
Blue Mahoe Capital is being built to be that bridge.
Mullings Sees the NASDAQ Listing as Step Four of a Twenty-Step Plan
The most recent SEC qualification arrived while Mullings was preparing for a presentation on Capitol Hill during Caribbean Legislative Week in Washington, D.C. . The Reg CF was step two. Reserving the ticket symbol was step one.
After he announced it, a friend sent him a quote: When your vision is so big you fail to realize how far you’ve come.
“This feels like step two of a twenty-step plan. We’ve built the rocket ship. We’ve trained the astronauts. We’re on the launch pad and the engines are warming up. Now we need to fuel the rocket.”
His father told him long ago never to say the sky is the limit.
“You have a Bachelor of Science degree. You know that the sky is not the limit. Aim for orbit. Get escape velocity. Once you’re out of the gravitational pull, you don’t need any more fuel to keep going. You just need momentum and no obstacles.”
Blue Mahoe Capital needs a minimum of US$5m dollars in stockholders’ equity to qualify to list on the NASDAQ Capital Market under the method they are pursuing. That is the fuel. Once it is raised, the listing follows. Once listed, the company can accept investors from anywhere in the world because they can just buy the stock on a major stock exchange, no longer just from US persons.
In Mullings’ plan, that is when the real work actually begins.
Blue Mahoe Capital: bluemahoecapital.com | Find David P.A. Mullings at LinkedIn.com/in/davidmullings and Instagram: @davidpmullings
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Stephen Stanberry
