We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Justin Li a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Justin , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

My business partner and I both have four year degrees. I went to George Washington and he went to Stanford. However, now, as employers and start-up founders, there is no way we would ever go to college if we had it to do over again. The reason is simple: the return on investment is quite horrific. Four year colleges and universities equip students with almost zero valuable skills. I can say this with authority because I do all of the interviewing and hiring for our company, Qore Performance, where we have more than 20 job openings right now. I have done 100+ interviews a year for the past five years. I have hard data from our experience that proves that candidates with greater life and career experience out-perform our candidates from four-year universities and it isn’t even close. Modern schools simply charge too much for what they give you, which is a lifetime of debt for which you have little to no return. I would move us to a vocational/trade/skills based education system and completely do away with “soft skills” course work. Anything outside of STEM, Creative Writing, Literature, or creative arts that have commercial value like Graphic Design, Video/Photography, Cinema, etc., should be completely eliminated because they do not equip students with skills to be valuable members of the workforce. While I am a man of faith, course work like Religious Studies doesn’t do much for a you when you apply to work for us. That type of course work has no commercial value.

Justin , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a former Reserve Deputy with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and the son of entrepreneur Bernard Li who started a company called Eagle One Industries that he later sold to Valvoline. I regularly battled hot and cold extremes as part of my work in law enforcement. Inspired by studies from Stanford University that demonstrated cooling the body properly is more effective than anabolic steroids at boosting endurance in addition to preventing heat injuries, the idea for what would eventually lead to the birth of Qore Performance came to me during a search for an armed suspect in the high deserts east of San Diego. Together with my business partner J.D. Willcox, we invented ICEPLATE: a 50 ounce water bottle shaped like an armor plate that controls core body temperature for people wearing personal protective equipment (PPE).
Originally designed to prevent heat stroke for US Military personnel wearing PPE, IcePlate is used by dozens of Fortune 1000 companies to protect their team members from the harmful effects of increasingly hostile environments. ICEPLATE boasts a perfect operational safety record with over 5,000,000 hours worked without a single minute lost to a heat injury since 2017. ICEPLATE anchors the Qore Performance IceAge Ecosystem: a comprehensive suite of thermoregulation technologies that weaponize temperature to enhance performance and survivability, liberating humans and machines from the constraints of their environment.

Saved with the aid of my grandparents at the age of 10, today I lean on my Christian faith to guide me personally and professionally. I live with my wife Tracy, also an entrepreneur, at our home designed by Tracy’s company (Tracy Morris Design), in McLean, VA.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We sell exclusively on our website for the domestic US market and we allow our International Distributor partners to sell on their e-commerce websites for their specific countries. When we first started the company, we sold on Amazon and it brought us good, consistent volume. However, we quickly realized that we were working for Amazon and not for ourselves. While I could write a book on this topic, here are the highlights: 1. The customers belong to Amazon, not you
2. The data belongs to Amazon, not you
3. Slim margins
4. Brutal terms
5. Amazon will protect its customers at your expense

6. Like the other Big Tech platforms, Amazon is not a great place to protect intellectual property. They will happily let Chinese counterfeits and fakes on their website to compete against you, even if you have an issued patent (which we do).

In short, we’ll never even consider selling on Amazon ever again and we strongly encourage every entrepreneur to do the same: never sell on Amazon. If you do, stop selling there ASAP to regain your business independence.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Bias for talent. When we started Qore Performance, I valued pure, outsized and exceptional talent above everything else. Now, in our seventh year of operation, I have had to unlearn this bias for talent. I have learned that grit is infinitely more valuable in team members. Grit is really what determines if someone is going to be successful with us, not talent. My bias toward talent resulted in some distinctive recruiting misses over the years, but I’ve been able to correct that significantly since I figured out that it was really grit that we wanted to see in our team members, not talent.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.qoreperformance.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/qoreperformance/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/QorePerformance
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/qoreperformanceusa

Image Credits
All images are 100% created and owned in-house by Qore Performance, Inc.