US entrepreneur Jeff Berndt joins The Life of Someone Extraordinary for a conversation that traces one of the most unlikely entrepreneurial origin stories - from journalism and storytelling to building a nationally distributed board game from scratch.

Jeff is the creator of Triopoly, a three-dimensional board game that grew from a sketch pad idea into a business with over 200 products in retail across the United States. Before that, he spent years as a journalist in Colorado, interviewing figures like Dave Matthews, Monica Seles, and former President Gerald Ford - studying what separated those who took the leap from those who didn’t.

In Part 1 of this conversation, we get into the moment Jeff decided to stop writing about other people’s lives and start building his own, the years of quiet work that followed, and the blizzard that unexpectedly opened the door to global distribution.

We also explore his approach to sales - shaped entirely by journalism — and the Wall Street deal in 2007 that brought a decade of work to the brink.

Jeff’s story is grounded, reflective, and honest about what it really takes to build something from nothing - and what happens when it all starts to come apart.