Who is Stephan Aarstol?
Stephan Aarstol grew up in Bellingham, Washington, and earned a business degree in finance, marketing and decision sciences from Western Washington University in 1996. Before Tower, he launched a web portal for the medical imaging field in 1999 and a high-end poker chip business in 2003. He founded Tower Paddle Boards in San Diego in 2010 to sell stand-up paddle boards directly to consumers online, cutting out retail markups. On Shark Tank Season 3 (2011), Mark Cuban invested $150,000 for 30%.
Tower was ranked San Diego's fastest-growing private company in 2014, was mentioned in Jeff Bezos's 2015 Amazon shareholder letter, was featured on Beyond the Tank and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. Aarstol later moved the company to a five-hour workday, the basis for his 2016 book, The Five-Hour Workday. He has since expanded the Tower brand into electric bikes and Tower Beach Club, and launched the No Middleman Project in 2018 to promote direct-to-consumer retail. He also edits Tower Life Magazine.
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