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What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his bran

What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his brand, because he didn't specify the contract under which they created design work for him, is telling. He seems like an energetic and very creative sales guy, who burns easily through money, but doesn't look at details enough. Also, his staff turnover rate doesn't sound good either. Why is he always so unstable? Come on, if you have an account like Costco or 7Eleven, you are making money. You should be able to run a stable business taking it from there - but then the job is not about being that creative anymore but about operations (just like in a big company). An entrepreneur friend of mine, who has been in business for over 40 years always says: "It's not what you make, it's what you keep!". Entrepreneurship does not need to be this extreme as it's portrayed here. I know enough company owners that coach sports for youth teams on the weekends and spend enough time with family.

menloparkbum 17y ago
What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. It says he was the manager of an industrial laundry facility prior to being a cofounder of a soft drink startup. Those sound like wildly different roles. He could have just been totally over his head. The first startup I worked at hired a bunch of corporate IT execs and former management consultants to be executives. Their old jobs seemed more related to their new ones than the guy in the article, yet they were still totally out of their element. They always tried to spend their way out of a hole, which always put us further in financial jeopardy. It sounds like the guy in the article tried to manage his company by doing the same sort of spending.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps. The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business. Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.
mattmaroon 17y ago
That's how running a startup feels, often even when it's going well. You're one bad beat away from the edge. Plenty of companies that sell goods through Costo or 7Eleven end up bankrupt. Having a decent distribution channel does not mean profit.

menloparkbum 17y ago

What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. It says he was the manager of an industrial laundry facility prior to being a cofounder of a soft drink startup. Those sound like wildly different roles. He could have just been totally over his head. The first startup I worked at hired a bunch of corporate IT execs and former management consultants to be executives. Their old jobs seemed more related to their new ones than the guy in the article, yet they were still totally out of their element. They always tried to spend their way out of a hole, which always put us further in financial jeopardy. It sounds like the guy in the article tried to manage his company by doing the same sort of spending.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago

It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps. The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business. Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.

mattmaroon 17y ago

That's how running a startup feels, often even when it's going well. You're one bad beat away from the edge. Plenty of companies that sell goods through Costo or 7Eleven end up bankrupt. Having a decent distribution channel does not mean profit.