How To Lose $850 Million And Not Really Care

Failures

from the so-it-goes dept

I started to get sick about all these “insider” or “dot com failure case studies” that have become popular over the past two years, but this one is a bit different. The NY Times Magazine is running a profile of eToys’ founder and CEO, Toby Lenk. It mainly focuses on the fact that he didn’t sell any of his stock (save a little bit near the end to cover a margin call). While he was once worth almost a billion dollar on paper, he came out of the experience with little more than the salary he took home over the four years of running the company. He even convinced the rest of his top execs to “go down with the ship” like he did. He talks about how he just wanted to run a real business – and how things got out of hand once Wall Street got involved. There’s also the bit about how some of the venture capitalists were “hit and run” investors who refused to invest some of their winnings to help keep the company running. For anyone who dreams of taking a company public some day, this would be a must read…