You can always learn things from great entrepreneurs. From John Tamny at realclearwire.com:
Get out of the car! Get the f**k out of my car.” That’s a paraphrase of the words of the recently passed, and incomparably GREAT Bernie Marcus. Marcus, along with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, co-founded The Home Depot.
The individual Marcus ordered out of his car was a venture capitalist, and more crucially for Marcus and his colleagues, a venture capitalist who had agreed to invest $3 million in The Home Depot. As Marcus recalled in Built From Scratch, the 1999 business memoir he co-authored with Blank, “we needed that $3 million the way somebody dying of stab wounds needs blood in his veins.”
Yet the principled Marcus still wouldn’t take a cent from the investor precisely because the investor insulted Marcus and the team he’d put together with all sorts of demands. They would have to give up health insurance, and accept even less pay than the low pay they’d already accepted in return for risky employment at a business that was more a concept than a business.
Marcus’s actions from long ago raise an obvious question: With money extraordinarily tight for a concept that had attracted no interest from blue-chip investment banks (they went with the wonderful Ken Langone and his “no-name investment bank”), why didn’t Marcus accept the terms (any terms) necessary to keep things afloat?
The answer is that entrepreneurialism isn’t a choice, it’s a state of mind. It’s a powerful belief in a different way of not just meeting, but leading the needs of customers that’s so deeply ingrained that it’s near impossible to compromise one’s vision. Marcus’s vision wouldn’t be insulted by this nit-picking investor, only for Marcus and colleagues to have the last laugh. By the late 1990s, the $3 million would have been worth $12 billion.
Have an uncle who did all that with a restaurant chain in CA before it was commie, he even wrote a book about it.
In to each according to his needs workers of the world unite, property is theft times, these kinds of people are legendary.
Blaze your own path, obliterate all obstacles, take no shit from anyone on the disrespect trip, this is the way.
Breaking from Isaac Hayes:
Theme From Shaft
[He’s a bad motha… shut yo mouth]