Bo Peabody started Tripod.com, with his professor (who gave him a B- in his course!), and later sold it to Lycos for $58 million. Inc. magazine has an excerpt of his new book, Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life.
Most interesting byte, “Was I lucky? You bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize that I was getting lucky.”
The book has some interesting thoughts which are worth deep interpretation. For example, the first round of $3m funding was done by the venture capital firm NEA, where Peadbody admits that NEA liked the plan because it mentioned the word “Internet” several hundred times. And why did NEA agreed to look into his business plan; his professor’s wife’s brother’s college roommate knew someone who knew someone at NEA(well, it’s always like that).
He further says, “I’ve often kidded that 90 percent of Tripod’s value was in the amount of press we received in such a concentrated period of time. Sitting at a board meeting, lamenting our anemic revenue, I once joked to the board of directors that rather than actually running ads on the Tripod site, I’d sell potential advertising customers the opportunity that I might mention them in an article or wear their logo on my baseball cap. The board didn’t laugh. They asked me to look into whether or not this plan was possible. Had I actually begun to believe what was being said about me in the press, I would never have sold Tripod when I did. I would have reasoned, instead, that I was in fact a genius, and that I should take complete credit for the great things happening to my company. Never mind that Tripod had little revenue, no profits, and an unproven business model; we should take this horse public. Had we taken it public, we would most likely have failed, and everyone, including many unsuspecting individual investors, would have lost a lot of money.”
Archive for January, 2005
Lucky or Smart? Smart enough to recognize the luck!
Sunday, January 30th, 2005Epinions founders sue Benchmark, August et al.
Tuesday, January 25th, 2005SiliconBeat reports.
Epinions.com was a high-flying startup with prominent backers like Benchmark, August, etc. I also remember listening to Nirav and Naval Ravikant at numerous occassions at TiE, SIPA, etc. The three co-founders (including RV Guha) left almost $18 million in stock options of @Home, Yahoo, and AOL to start epinions.com and took the company to funding stage in record 12 weeks from the idea (even before a single line of code was written!).
Found this on Google —
Everyone has an opinion, how do you get paid for it. Well, something to reflect upon.
Two India existing as One
Saturday, January 8th, 2005Resurgent India is being strongly divided into two faces. There are various ways to put it–rural vs. urban, literate vs. illiterate, rich vs. poor, malnutritioned vs. obese, haves vs. have-nots, etc. Each category beckons other. The two faces co-exist with one face wishing that the other would just go away, unmindful of the fact that the social fabric has been stitched that way. India’s burgeoning population of skilled and unskilled labor is the very thing, which is putting it to advantage. Western world is ready to outsource anything involving human labor at the drop of a coin. The very reason that the Indian steel industry majors can think of doubling the output of finished steel from 36 million tonnes is because of cheap labor ( In fact labor never comes to the mind while planning, as it is abundantly available!). Think about the same in United States–most of the large-scale mining and industrial units are on the path of thin margins because of expensive labor.
One face is occupying the springing malls, clean offices, and housing units–The other living in slums, working in dastardly conditions earning just the minimum wage. Take this:
- India still has the world