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How I Spent A Million Bucks And Ended Up With These Two Chairs.
- vang3lis 17y ago404
- stuff4ben 17y agoA 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.
- noodle 17y agoi 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
- numbchuckskills 17y agoI would disagree. I would suggest that this dude is a tool, and that money is just fine.
- helveticaman 17y agoI feel like it can, but it takes time and energy to accomplish. But...it's weird to want to accomplish those things.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- antidaily 17y agoIf he sold the rest of the furniture he bought with the million, then presumably he has/had that money too.
- Retric 17y agoIt 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.)
- callmeed 17y agoKeep 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.
- kyro 17y agoI, too, am interested in finding out more about his previous venture.
- axod 17y agoIt's been posted a few times, http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/04/08/the-andrew-warner-story-how-a-21-year-old-created-a-385-million-dollar-business-by-returning-his-jcrew-clothes/ http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/04/08/the-andrew-warner-stor...
- tom_rath 17y agoThanks 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.
- callmeed 17y ago"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.
- zandorg 17y agoJerry 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).
- hs 17y agoi 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
- zaidf 17y agoI 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 http://zaid.posterous.com/me-office-and-bed
- scrame 17y agoAmazon _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.
- omarchowdhury 17y agoHe 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?
- mediaman 17y agoI'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.
- AndrewWarner 17y agoGood 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.
- prewett 17y agoThere'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.