tony fernandes is one of my favorite entrepreneurs that no one talks about the amount of shit this guy has survived / attempted over the last 25 years is ridiculous > spent 14 years in the music industry & had zero airline experience > mortgaged his house + put in his own savings to take over a failing airline for $0.25 alongside $11m in debt (got 2 airplanes to start with) > three days after the deal went through, 9/11 happened > turned it profitable within roughly a year > then survived SARS, bird flu, the 2004 tsunami, record oil prices & the global financial crisis > in 2014 one of their planes crashed, killing all 162 people onboard > then covid grounded basically the entire airline and pushed the company into financial distress > instead of just waiting for travel to return, they tried turning airasia into a super app: food delivery, ride hailing, parcels, fintech, hotels, flights etc > that eventually became MOVE - which today has 16m+ monthly users and did $1.3b in gross bookings in a single quarter > spent almost 6 years restructuring the entire company after covid > completed the restructuring in 2026, separated the airline from Capital A & finally exited its financial distress status > then immediately went back on offense and ordered 150 airbus A220s, the largest A220 order ever, with options for another 150 > they even tried to cancel my boi for posting a shirtless image of him getting massaged in the office every time i feel down, people like tony serve as a reminder that this journey is supposed to be freaking hard

Tony Donatell has a knack for spotting business opportunities that others might overlook. Over the past two years, he’s transformed an empty storefront next to an Amoco gas station convenience store in Lakeville, Minnesota into The Farmer’s Cellar, an upscale restaurant and cocktail bar with a speakeasy twist. Donatell, 46, is the owner and founder of the Wondrous Collective, a restaurant group that owns 12 businesses, including The Farmer’s Cellar, in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Learn how Donatell built his business into what it is today: