How I Spent A Million Bucks And Ended Up With These Two Chairs. | Hacker News Reader

How I Spent A Million Bucks And Ended Up With These Two Chairs.

blog.mixergy.com

67 pointsmerrick3338 comments

Keep your costs down, sure ... sort of a basic lesson

Cal me crazy, but I'm really skeptical about this author in general ... why is it so hard to find info about his previous $30MM revenue business? What exactly did Bradford & Reed do–and how much was it acquired for? I see mentions of greeting cards and games ... but no mentions of any actual profit or acquisition details.

I'm starting to feel like the startup world is becoming inundated with people who just want to sell stuff to startup founders (be it books, info, their name or whatever). Frankly, its getting old.

Yes, startup founders need solid advice and lessons from those who have done it before. But, for God's sake, use some discretion when it comes to the source of your advice.

the startup world is becoming inundated with people who just want to sell stuff to startup founders

He's part of the parallel universe in silicon valley (physically, and in spirit) of people who hold seminars, arrange mixers, make blogs, write twitter posts, and generally act as a big sideshow and social group for 2nd rate startups and their entourages.

It's a surreal place filled with the same people at every event (and linked on every blog or re-tweeted on every tweet) who seem like they must be important, but aren't.

Sometimes worlds collide and Tim Ferris does a talk at Google (or TED - WTF?) or Tara Hunt doles out free beer at a conference room at Yahoo!...

In my experience unless your girlfriend is working for one of their boutique PR firms you can safely avoid everything about this world.

I'm coming to do a geek/startup tour of silicon valley... can you recommend any events/groups that don't suck? Because what you're describing sounds pretty similar to the worst of our local networking groups, and I get really irritated when I show up for one and its a bunch of guys trying to sell me management consulting and a 'startup' speaker that made millions selling used hardware.

It's hard for me to recommend anything, because I don't feel like I've gotten much out of the good events I've gone to. I'm not really an event guy. I'd probably be more useful in the negative for particular cases, like "that one sucks - definitely DON'T go to that one." Also - I haven't gone to any of these things for almost a year.

That said, SuperHappyDevHouse is the only event that is genuinely hacker oriented. Some of the particular tech specific meetups I've been to have had good presentations.

If you really want to network it's probably best to figure out where your favorite startups go out to drink beer on Fridays. If you're looking for hackerish, generally interesting things to do, events like Maker Faire are pretty good.

So you wouldn't recommend the entrepreneur educational events Stanford organizes? The tech stuff we have here, somewhat, although I'll be there for the Hadoop Summit. Was hoping to get a glimpse into people making all these connections that the valley is supposed to offer a startup.

Gonna catch an open coffee, but still looking for things to do relating to startup/biz side of things. I'm not looking to network for anything in particular so much as get a good sense of the environment.

Oh, actually that kind of thing sounds cool. I just haven't been. Stanford is great and is worth going to an event there if you're in the area.

But you're saying that cocktail hour by Blanko.com would not be a great networking event as it would be characterized by wanton douschebaggery? I'm trying to catch some of those too, just to experience them.

Sorry to pick your brain, but I'm 'exploring' valley/provincial market differences for fun.

Which groups suck? :)

I'd suggest Startup2Startup that's held in Palo Alto.

I attended the most recent one while I was out in the valley, and I thought it was really good.

Thanks, I wish I'd caught Steve Blank's talk, reading his book right now.

I like the cut of your jib.

Since you seem to know Andrew so well, how do you explain that he lives in Santa Monica and does most of his interviews over Skype? Really though, if you spent some time on mixergy.com you might appreciate what he does instead of blindly judging Andrew.

Have you ever actually met Andrew?

nope.

"Those who can Do. Those who cannot Teach" (or Blog).

"Where ends Performance, starts Appearance"

I, too, am interested in finding out more about his previous venture.

It's been posted a few times,

http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/04/08/the-andrew-warner-stor...

"We sold the business in pieces to people we did business with over the years"

That doesn't sound like an acquisition

"that company made 38.5 million dollars a year"

No, they made $38.5 million dollars ONE YEAR. The year before, it was 5.5 ... the year after, who knows ...

I guess little semantic games like this are necessary when you need to position yourself as a seasoned expert–for the purposes of gaining readership to your blog or selling your book.

I think it's mentioned that part of his company was sold to brad greenspan of euniverse/intermix(myspace) fame. I don't know how much this reflects on Andrew and/or mailbits, but brad greenspan and euniverse are know for, among other things, 'legitimizing' the adware business, until most everyone realized it wasn't legitimate. Also euniverse and brad had a pretty well publicized accounting fraud scandal that resulted in him leaving euniverse. Anyone that worked in the LA online advertising business during the late 90s early 00s will know euniverse is about as shady as shady can get, without actually getting thrown in jail.

Some startups would be happy to get $38.5 M in revenue ANY YEAR. You can knock the guy all you like, but he's been through the trenches and his Mixergy content is pretty good.

How many really believe the story about selling his old (presumably worn) clothes back to J Crew to raise his seed capital? I'm guessing the truth is that he pitched a J Crew board member by including 'the clothes off his back' as a jokey item in his business proposal, but that's not the substantive part which got him the check. Sorry, I'm getting a 'rich dad, poor dad' vibe off this guy and his site.

He sure knows how to "tell a story". That could indeed mean embellishing the facts.

Thanks for that.

After reading the two-chair tale o' woe, the comment that they "sold the business in pieces" leads me to think his company collapsed after the dot.com bust.

Sure, their 1999-2000 balance sheet looked spiffy, but that was the peak of the boom. How did the next year go? Did these guys enjoy a profitable exit or endure a liquidation?

Edit: Poking about, it seems they sold the company in 2003. That's quite a time after the 1999-2000 numbers being splashed about in his feel-good writing. I'll bet the numbers in those later years would shine a bit more light on the business's true condition.

It is a basic lesson, but one that doesn't hurt to hear over and over again. While his example might seem 'obvious' and 'extreme' it is all relative.

All startups make mistakes like this. Especially if it's your first one, your doing kinda ok, and your twentysomething. The startups that survive are the ones that don't make that one mistake big enough to tank the company.

Jerry Yang slept under his desk, Amazon had door desks.

I tried to emulate Yang by renting an office - I wanted to sleep nights in it. But I chickened out and continued to work from my bedroom (a UK equivalent of a USA garage).

I never understood how someone ACTUALLY sleeps "under" a desk:p My desks have too many power cords to make any kinda sleep possible.

I went with this: http://zaid.posterous.com/me-office-and-bed

Amazon _has_ door desks. Its an ironic (and often quoted) point of pride that a door desk costs more than a standard office desk at corporate buying rates, but symbolizes thriftiness which as a corporate ethic provides much more value.

i use left-side wardrobe as desk and my bed as chair

and right-side as standing desk (height adjustable by dowel pins)

total area: 2x3 m² (double bed); height: 3 m

A great lesson we should all learn from. His mistake was in thinking that money could buy him prestige, power, and respect. It hardly ever works.

i would agree with this statement if it said "money alone".

money's a tool, and if you put it in the hands of someone who deserves prestige/power/respect, someone wise/thoughtful/intelligent, it could potentially speed along that process faster than it would happen without it (if used wisely).

/$0.02

I would disagree. I would suggest that this dude is a tool, and that money is just fine.

I feel like it can, but it takes time and energy to accomplish. But...it's weird to want to accomplish those things.

He doesn't even say what business this was for. And don't tell me it was for Bradford & Reed... why would they need to impress clients - why are clients even going to a Manhattan corporate office to buy greeting cards?

Good question. Wish I asked that at the time.

My clients were the sponsors who bought my ads.

Like you said, they hardly ever came to NYC to meet. Pretty much all my business was done by phone or I flew to a clients' office.

But when I had a dinky office in Queens, one of my clients came to see me. And I was embarrassed when he saw my office.

And instead of being smart and dismissing it, I magnified the incident in my head.

I'll bet you're right about it being for Bradford & Reed -- I've seen some people who feel slighted because they're young try to overcompensate with glamorous office space, even when they're only trying to impress their employees.

If he sold the rest of the furniture he bought with the million, then presumably he has/had that money too.

It was an ambiguous statement; the implication was the loss of value for that venture was a million, with the only benefit being 2 chairs. I don't think a floor in Manhattan + retail cost of furniture + a decorator is going to be cheap even if you sublet the space and sell the furniture. (Then again subletting might have been a net gain.)

There's an observation in value investing that if a company buys a gorgeous new headquarters the stock is going to do poorly, presumably for similar reasons as this guy. I think it was Peter Lynch who commented on this.

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