Andrew: Alright before you watch this next program you first have to hear about Haystack. Haystack.com is where you’re gonna find the right designer for your next project. And let me show you something, you already know that as you scroll through Haystack you could see examples of work from each design firm that’s listed here, you already know that you can flip through their work really easily let me show you something that’s kind of cool. You find the firm you’re interested in, you click on their name, you could see more of their work in bigger pictures, but you could also save to favorites and because it’s designed by 37signals you know you’re not gonna have to register to save something to your favorites just easy like that. Alright we like this design firm, we’re gonna save them to our favorites, and then you can go back into my favorites right up on top and see the firms that you were interested in. Get inspired by the work here at...
Text excerpt: showering with construction workers
In this section, Mark talks about BuildOnline, the company he founded in 1999.
We were a really big deal until we weren’t, you know? Goldman Sachs was an investor. We were going to IPO within 12 months for north of a billion dollars.
I know it sounds crazy, but a comparable company out there had an eight billion dollar market cap on less than two million dollars of revenue, so anything seemed achievable.
I had a company approach me about acquiring our company for a hundred and fifty million dollars a year into our company, and I thought, “A hundred and fifty million between friends is chump change.” I know it sounds dumb, but this was 2000.
And then in 2001, I had very humbling experiences. I had 122 staff. Thirty of them were contractors, 92 were full-time employees. I had recruited people out of Goldman Sachs, GE Equity, Anderson Consulting (Accenture, now), Morgan Stanley, you name it, and a lot of them were Harvard MBA’s, Stanford MBA’s.
I had to go from 122 total staff, 92 employees, down to 38 in one day, and then within a month, I took it down to 33 — one of the most humbling experiences of my life. And I laid off nearly all of my friends. It was awful. And I’d say in 2001, we really had to build a real company, and that’s when I realized that I maybe hadn’t done the right thing, but having taken that kind of money from investors, I felt a huge sense of responsibility.
And just one quick aside…I remember traveling through Germany, and I didn’t want to spend money on hotels, because we had pledged to build a capital-efficient company, so I used to sleep in Neu-Isenburg, which is south of Frankfurt, in a pizzeria. They had three rooms above the pizzeria, and they used to rent me rooms for thirty euros a night, and that’s what my life became in 2001.
They actually then decided not to offer those as rooms anymore. So, we’d gotten a taste of cheap rooms, so I went down the street in Neu-Isenburg and just stayed at the cheapest place I could find. It was 35 euros a night, so I was wasting five euros.
But then I found out they didn’t have bathrooms in the room, and I had to take a shower down the hall, no joke, walking down the hall to take a shower in the morning next to Turkish construction workers wearing leopard-print underwear. That was about the low point, and that’s a true story.
And, you know, had I built my company from a foundation of that in the first place, I think I would have set off in a much better trajectory. And it’s in those down years – 2001, 2002, 2003 – when no one would return my phone calls, that I built a real company, and everything I ever learned bout being an entrepreneur was in those three years.
Full program includes
– How the real world requires entrepreneurs to do things that wouldn’t look good on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, including a revelation from Mark.
– How Mark turned a troubled company around. You’ll even hear a detailed example of what you should be willing to say to your customers if you want to turn around your business. (And if you think it’s beneath you to have this conversation, this interview will show you why you might not be ready for entrepreneurship.)
– Why your elementary school teacher was wrong and how having a chip on your shoulder might make you a better entrepreneur.