The day I woke up without arms and legs. [Lessons from a startup failure]

lundxy.com

20 points·miraj··11 comments

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"I have personally put DKK 105 million into this project – money that I have been borrowing – VERY BAD CHOICE..."

According to Google:

105 000 000 Danish kroner = 18.57975 million U.S. dollars

Is that correct or a typo?

He mentions similar numbers elsewhere, implies not a typo.

It's correct - he's a quite prolific guy, and was an early investor in Skype which was sold to Ebay for a gazillion.

Right now he's broke though.

So he was rich and he plunged all of it, plus some more, into a newspaper venture?

Never gamble with money you can't afford to lose.

Agree - also, it's unfortunate for the Danish startup scene since he was one of the only knowledgeable seed investors in the country.

There was a LeWeb '08 or '09 presentation where he said that he put in around €30mio in the newspaper project.

When I opened the email I actually expected to read a sad story about someone losing his arms and legs because of a startup failure.

Dude, don't speak like that, at least you've still got your arms and legs ;-)

It's an interesting contrast to the article above on what it's like to get shot with a handgun which does, in fact, tell you what it's like to get shot with a handgun. (Spoiler alert: it really hurts.)

Note this is from 2008. His about page says:

2010 | MAR I’m officially out of bankruptcy

Which sounds like he's come around of losing the US$18mil he mentions in that article.

His about page is really impressive. Lots of failures and lots of sucesses. He definitely doesn't give up.

I love this quote from the video: "You can't time timing!"

It's not immediately clear from the title or the opening paragraph, but it's someone talking about the failure of his startup.

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