Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060301/confessions_Printer_Friendly.html

by hwijaya • 17 years ago

111 42 17 years ago

inc.com

jimboyoungblood• 17 years ago

Bonus reading: http://www.bevnet.com/bevblog/2007/11/new-book-on-the-switch...

jaxn2• 17 years ago

Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.

jaxn2• 17 years ago

Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.

tc• 17 years ago

Best quote:

Neither of the company's two founders, nor any of their successors, can alter the product's basic economics.

This former executive claims they were trying to sell a product for $1.29 that cost them more than $1.00 to produce and distribute. If true, this sealed the company's fate regardless of any drama or inattention to detail.

edw5192• 17 years ago

"When I think about those start-up days, I realize I've given up far more than I had planned. Years of writing, of books and magazine articles I could have published. I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships. I lament the toll on Bill's health, and Lily had no choice in giving up precious years with her father."

Therein lies the biggest difference between the entrepreneur and the non-entrepreneur: he looks ahead and she looks back.

prospero• 17 years ago

Being an entrepreneur means that you can't reflect on the consequences of past choices?

edw5192• 17 years ago

Never said that.

I also never met an entrepreneur that would have said OP's quote either.

trevelyan• 17 years ago

This woman sounds remarkably selfish. She admits to not working during the three years her husband was starting the company and spending summers on vacation with her child learning Spanish, yet her catalog of grievances includes the strange claim she has lost time that could have been spent publishing and socializing.

Couldn't she have churned out a couple of articles while on vacation in Spain? Or maybe have saved some cash by spending the summer at home.

Unbelievable.

bonsaitree• 17 years ago

Agreed. Rich people complaining about trials and tribulations regarding conditions they can actively change and/or control. The author's comments and general attitude have all the earmarks of a "trust-funded" childhood.

breck• 17 years ago

Really?

I think sharing this personal story with all the details is a very unselfish thing. I would say the exact opposite.

I think giving up her husband so he could work all that time, and raising their daughter practically alone, is very unselfish.

alexitosrv2• 17 years ago

She tries to present the facts, but her insatisfaction skews the story. Actually, I think sharing this personal story with all the details mainly from her viewpoint can be deemed as selfish behavior.

granular• 17 years ago

I agree. She wants him to work his ass off, and when he does, complains about not having him around. And to top it off, she stops working on her own profession, gets depressed, and then considers leaving him (which would entail taking his child away from him). She says, "but I couldn't stop picking fights about his lack of time at home.". Nice, kick him while he's down.

Later -- talking about sales in general -- she adds, "When he convinces me to stay married to him, he's selling me on the better future we will have together.".

So, he's got to convince you regularly to stay married to him, eh? For better or worse too old fashioned I guess.

Regarding what she's given up: "I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships."

Near the end she says: "I'm betting that before too long, Bill will decide to do it all again." Keep holding out your hope for all that money.

psranga2• 17 years ago

I was bothered by the lack of introspection in the article.

timr• 17 years ago

Oh, come on...a long, well-written essay, and the best you can do is a one-line swipe at the author? At least explain why you think she lacks introspection!

The comment voting here is getting to be really bad.

christofd8• 17 years ago

What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his brand, because he didn't specify the contract under which they created design work for him, is telling. He seems like an energetic and very creative sales guy, who burns easily through money, but doesn't look at details enough. Also, his staff turnover rate doesn't sound good either.

Why is he always so unstable? Come on, if you have an account like Costco or 7Eleven, you are making money. You should be able to run a stable business taking it from there - but then the job is not about being that creative anymore but about operations (just like in a big company).

An entrepreneur friend of mine, who has been in business for over 40 years always says: "It's not what you make, it's what you keep!". Entrepreneurship does not need to be this extreme as it's portrayed here. I know enough company owners that coach sports for youth teams on the weekends and spend enough time with family.

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster.

It says he was the manager of an industrial laundry facility prior to being a cofounder of a soft drink startup. Those sound like wildly different roles. He could have just been totally over his head.

The first startup I worked at hired a bunch of corporate IT execs and former management consultants to be executives. Their old jobs seemed more related to their new ones than the guy in the article, yet they were still totally out of their element. They always tried to spend their way out of a hole, which always put us further in financial jeopardy. It sounds like the guy in the article tried to manage his company by doing the same sort of spending.

HeyLaughingBoy• 17 years ago

It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps.

The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business.

Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

That's how running a startup feels, often even when it's going well. You're one bad beat away from the edge.

Plenty of companies that sell goods through Costo or 7Eleven end up bankrupt. Having a decent distribution channel does not mean profit.

mahmud• 17 years ago

What a whiner. My girlfriend is a musician, and a very driven and inspired woman. I don't think she will ever describe herself so publicly as ${MALE_ADJECTIVE}'s wife.

Stop deriving your identity and self-worth from your partner; writing is not the sort of thing that one has to put on hold because one's partner is busy making business .. quite the contrary, the fucker is busy at home and away, crack those fingers and get cracking!

knightinblue2• 17 years ago

I love the design of their site - www.switchbev.com

inglorian• 17 years ago

Yeah, that flash intro that you can't skip isn't at all annoying...

knightinblue2• 17 years ago

I meant the 'switch between what you want and what you don't want'.

It's creative.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

How do you have a situation where you make a funding deal, the guys only come through with half, and they still get their equity share?

pclark• 17 years ago

desperation

ams6110• 17 years ago

I've personally seen it happen twice. A company that has a reasonably well developed product is short on cash. Some "white knight" appears with a big investment, but the deal drags out, the company is forced into bankruptcy, and the so-called savior acquires it for a fraction of the original investment amount. Seeing this same scenario here makes me think it must be a common predatory tactic. Lesson is, if you've got a good product but are short on cash, be very wary of big investors.

sutro6• 17 years ago

This is one of the better pieces linked to from HN in some time, yet most of the comments here are critical of either the author or her husband or both. Critics, please raise your hands if either you or your spouse has raised $10M in a depressed economy, nationally launched a new consumer product into a hyper-competitive industry, and achieved multi-million dollar revenues while trying to hold a marriage and family together. Anyone? Bueller?

christofd8• 17 years ago

What's questionable about the article is that it portrays entrepreneurship being so extreme and anti-social. It's about running a business. Bill doesn't do a good job here.

He's great at marketing and raising money but that's not what a company survives on and continues to pay people's paychecks and paying back his investors. Summary: the company founder did a poor job at taking care of employees, investors and his own family. Is this considered desirable behavior these days?

I thought we learned something from two market crashes after 2000. This is basically a typical reckless Gen-Xer dot-com story risking it all and going broke. I'm amazed his investors (which got screwed) even gave him money.

sutro6• 17 years ago

You imply that you could have done better. So please share your relevant comparable experience. Ever raise $10M and bear the weight of those investor expectations? Ever been CEO of a multi-million dollar company? Ever launch a manufactured consumer product? I suspect that it might be a bit difficult. I suspect that what is best for your investors, your partners, your employees, your customers, your family, and yourself might not always be the same thing, which I suspect might lead to many difficult decisions along the way, decisions which unfortunately will later get called into question by a peanut gallery of HN readers who consider themselves business experts because they've built a couple of websites.

psranga2• 17 years ago

Several points in no particular order why I think this may be a "good" article (i.e., it's good storytelling), but I'm still critical of this article.

While writing this reply, I skimmed a couple of food startup companies on Wikipedia. It looks like these guys tried to do a SoBe (started 1996 bought by Pepsi in 2000; they year they started their company) and failed. I'd be very interested in an account of the SoBE story.

1. No reasoning in the article about why they thought this drink would sell.

2. First expenses are to buy two Land Rovers? AFAIK, these are not the cheapest SUVs. And this is literally like in a recent bad movie I watched ("Role Models").

3. On the same lines, they got an RV and two salespeople to drive around nationwide in an RV handing out samples? Was this drink even available nationwide? I've never seen it. Why were they spreading themselves so thin?

4. No mention in the article about how they got things done on the cheap. Which is a staple of all startup stories. Looks like they splurged on everything.

5. I had to read the BevNet link somebody posted to this article to find out that this drink costs much more than sodas because it uses real juice. It costs $1 to make and sells for $1.29. Is there a tiny probability that this could have contributed to the failure of the drink?

6. I mean this thing costs in the range of Red Bull and Starbucks but they market it as a competitior to Pepsi and Coke?

7. As I kept reading the article, I noticed how everything was being blamed on everybody else other than Bill. Bill did no wrong, and others let him down. I did not see enough evidence to convince me that this was the case.

8. Though billed as wife's story, this article is equally about Bill. So I have a problem that Bill is written up from the point of view of an adoring wife.

9. The BevNet thread shows that there are some people who are very angry with Bill. Btw "Wayne" (he doesn't get the courtesy of his real name being using, I think he's Mike Gilbert from the bevnet thread) has a book out to put his side of the story. This article sounds like an attempt to rehabilitate Bill's reputation.

10. Notice how they heavily criticize LKCM for "attempting" to bankrupt the company. But I'm supposed to find nothing suspicious about Bill proposing a deal with a new investor which would give the new guys 51% of the company (meaning management control with ability to replace Bill etc).

11. In short, at the end of the article, I was completely unsurprised at the total failure of the company. There is only one lesson to learned from this story for me: if hire a Bill, you'll fail. But I already knew that.

Andys• 17 years ago

> the CEO said, "it's better to have 1 percent of 10 million than 100 percent of nothing."

A false dichotomy, surely.

The voice in the back of my head says its better to have >=50% of something small with real, stable growing than 1% of 10 million where you are trying to outsmart the wolf packs of the VC industry.

keltecp11• 17 years ago

This is really well done... some relationships in my life have certainly been affected by, well you get it.

Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife

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