In his shoes, I would definitely call it a complete failure. It was certainly very educational, but failure nonetheless. I think his failure lies in equating making money with success.
The purpose of commerce is to help us create value for one another. But there is a bunch of activity that uses the same tools that is essentially parasitic. The reason his income streams kept blowing up was that people eventually decided that they were better off without him involved.
He could have spent 10 years building products that were creating value. He could have spent 10 years learning the tools and techniques necessary to make the sorts of thing where customers can't get enough. Instead, he spent a decade as a leech on the ankle of the economy, getting scratched off and reattaching himself.
I could have gone the same way. In high school I had a job doing telephone fundraising. It turned out to be basically a scam, with ~12% of the money collected even going to the non-profit, and therefore even less being spent on actual beneficial work. There was a lot that was appealing in the work: smart, funny people; great challenges; getting paid in cash. But eventually I came to realize how morally bankrupt it was. I got lucky in that it was much easier to see how what I was doing was worthless.
So now he's basically starting over. And good for him, I say. I think this post is incredibly brave, and I wish him the best of luck in making something so useful that customers are clamoring to hand over their money.
He was more or less fired as CEO of Paypal IIRC, but I'd be hard-pressed to call it a failure either way. Overall I'd say he's done quite well but the world is full of people that were great in one venture and then failed miserably in another.
Yeah. For investing so much time and money it seems like he gave up after a couple of bad meetings.
It takes years to figure out how to properly sell your product. He didn't find out that his product wouldn't work in the marketplace he just found out he didn't know how to sell it.
He probably learned more about business from this venture than $10,000 of business education would have given him. I've also lost that much on a venture once, and the irony is that like his business it was also a potentially profitable and viable business and may have succeeded if we had the experience to approach it differently.
The guy created a $4 billion business that changed the game for co-working spaces. He just made the mistake of convincing people it was a $47 billion company, and Soft Bank threw fuel on the fire. (and he did some weird shit with the IPO)
What he accomplished is still incredibly difficult, and by all accounts he has a rare skill set for getting people excited about a vision. Plus, his failure mode is widely known now.
I'd throw money at him if I had some to throw, for sure. Don't bet against crazy and smart.
I think he has regrets. He lost a lot of money and most of his friends. A lot of people would say that learning about marketing and coding do not make it worth it.
Most startups fail, so it's not surprising many of his initiatives have also failed. Regardless of his career path, at least he's now trying to do something worthwhile with his wealth.
He did the "hard" part of this, which is getting investors. It didn't matter whether the business failed at that point.
If he'd just failed without the deception he could have collected his golden parachute, then gone on to keep failing at new startups for an indefinite amount of time.
Seems like this was his life's dream to do, and he got to do it. So, I'm not sure it was entirely a bust. But certainly it was a very expensive dream to follow. And how many really ambitious people fail and fail again, before finally succeeding at something? It is a common story. Not that failure is any guarantee of success.
I have to agree. It's not that he 'failed' in many respects he was wildly successful.
You can do a whole lot of things right but if their is something rotten at the core that undermines everything.
Groupon was rotten. The accounting was shady [1], in my view inexcusable so. I profited handsomely from shorting it, they sold the market what can only be described as a lie. The smoking guns were lying all over the place. Maybe if you tell yourself something loud enough often enough you can come to believe it, that doesn't make it true / right.
I was just thinking what it may have been like from his perspective. To him, it was the same set of actions as was required to start something like AirBnb or some such. You write software. You get your initial users, etc. You get feedback & you loop.
With the same set of actions & work, pointing in a different direction, he could have done quite well for himself working on another idea.
I'm guessing his biggest downfall really was in having an aversion to working with others. He could work with others at a startup and make some great stuff & quite possibly do well. Instead, he chose a more sure fire approach to making money on his own -- with the morality and legality of what he was doing as the cost.
Sounds like he was too focused on inventing and forgot the production/sales aspect. He literally had the product and had thousands of people emailing him directly ready to buy! And he still complains that he couldn’t sell.
He should have realized his personal shortcomings and partnered with someone who had the qualities he lacked.
This sounds quite awesome, terrible, and he sounds like he was jumping into a very deep end. Quite sad that he seemingly didn't have someone to tutor/mentor him moving to this role. Given that it worked, and there was a learning curve as you described, over a decade, he seems to have had some big amount of determination to get things to work.
He claimed to know things about the economy and raised $8 billion to capitalize on his ideas. Turns out he was full of shit. He had no idea what he was doing and lost huge amounts of money over years. He wasn't just bad he was arrogantly clueless.
Now he's claiming to know things about the economy again.
He may have been ousted from PayPal, but that didn't change the fact that he was a primary share-holder and made hundreds of millions of dollars when it was sold out. Besides the money it also opened up the door for him to move on to bigger and better things. I doubt there are may people aside from Elon Musk who would consider that "failure".
What's interesting to me is that he started with a successful business model that really did change the industry for the better in a few ways (better hours, better customer service, etc.). The greed and sociopathy turned that into fraud.
The purpose of commerce is to help us create value for one another. But there is a bunch of activity that uses the same tools that is essentially parasitic. The reason his income streams kept blowing up was that people eventually decided that they were better off without him involved.
He could have spent 10 years building products that were creating value. He could have spent 10 years learning the tools and techniques necessary to make the sorts of thing where customers can't get enough. Instead, he spent a decade as a leech on the ankle of the economy, getting scratched off and reattaching himself.
I could have gone the same way. In high school I had a job doing telephone fundraising. It turned out to be basically a scam, with ~12% of the money collected even going to the non-profit, and therefore even less being spent on actual beneficial work. There was a lot that was appealing in the work: smart, funny people; great challenges; getting paid in cash. But eventually I came to realize how morally bankrupt it was. I got lucky in that it was much easier to see how what I was doing was worthless.
So now he's basically starting over. And good for him, I say. I think this post is incredibly brave, and I wish him the best of luck in making something so useful that customers are clamoring to hand over their money.
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