Gerard Adams

Early life and education

Adams was born in New Jersey in 1984, and grew up in Belleville, New Jersey. His father worked at Prudential Financial and his mother at A&P. In an interview with BeYou, Adams said he was born with a “natural hustle mentality.”

He graduated from Belleville High School and became interested in the stock market at the urging of his father, who asked him to look up Prudential stock. He spent one semester at Caldwell University before he dropped out to work for an investor relations firm.

Career

In the 2000s, Adams was inspired by online forums on Raging Bull and Silicon Investor, which he said had contributors who lacked credibility, and added a ratings system to his own forum to found Wall Street Grand. The website included a 5-star ratings feature to evaluate writer contributions. Adams claimed he grew Wall Street Grand to $10 million in revenue before the 2008 stock market crash. He founded several other finance-related companies, including an online investor-relations and financial-marketing company, and the National Inflation Association, which educates consumers on how to survive in any economic environment.

In an interview with journalist Farnoosh Torabi, Adams said that he took a position in investor relations at nanobatteries firm mPhase to build an 18,000-investor audience. Adams pitched the idea to mPhase executives of a real-time demonstration of the mPhase nanobattery. However, in front of an audience of hundreds of investors the technology failed to operate, leading to what Adams has called his “first failure.”

Adams is a partner in KD Healthcare USA, a medical device company. He also invests in New York City real estate and new housing developments. Adams has helped develop affordable housing for communities in Newark, NJ, where his father and family were raised. He has invested in nine different startups.

FOWNDERS

Adams has said that he was mentored by Tony Robbins. Inspired by Robbins’ quote, “success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure,” Adams launched FOWNDERS as a mentorship movement to help others succeed in business. FOWNDERS is a non-profit start-up accelerator with the goal of establishing Newark, New Jersey as an innovation hub. Adams modeled the business after major Silicon Valley incubators and assembled a team of trailblazers and branding professionals to support FOWNDERS entrepreneurs with benefits that include free workspace, mentorship, and access to start up financing.

Elite Daily

Adams provided the initial funding for Elite Daily, an idea that originated in February 2012, which he co-founded with his interns David Arabov and Jonathan Francis.

Forbes credited Adams with being “able to recognize that his interns were ‘onto something.’” Adams told both Francis and Arabov to “forget the internship work” and “join forces,” as partners to build Elite Daily. By the end of 2013, the company earned $400,000 in profit and averaged 41 million readers monthly. In 2015, Adams, along with his co-founders, sold Elite Daily to the Daily Mail for $50 million.

Awards and recognition

Adams is a celebrity judge for the 2016 Shorty Awards, which honors "the best on social media."

In 2014 and 2015, Silicon Alley named Adams to its Top 100 List, which ranks the “coolest, most inspiring people in the New York tech industry.” In 2016 Adams was a celebrity speaker at Brandathon and gave a TEDx talk at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Personal life

Adams lives in Manhattan with his dog, a dachshund named Gigi.