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.”
