The "Chief Everything Officer" gets a forklift driving lesson

Here's a great mistake story from Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company, brewer of Sam Adams beer. The interview with Koch is from a new series in the Washington Post called, "When We Were Small," about the startup phases of successful businesses.

When you start your own business, you’re the CEO, but you’re not the Chief Executive Officer, because there’s nobody there to execute for you. You’re the Chief Everything Officer. Immediately, you have to start doing these things you’ve never done before, and it ranges from, for us, how do you design a label? How do you make a sales call on a bar? How do you negotiate a real estate lease. I had never done any of that. And the list goes on and on, all these practical nuts and bolts of the business that, if you do them really badly, they can kill your company.

Here’s a literal example. In the very beginning, a truckload of beer arrived that I had to put away into the little warehouse we had. Well, I had never driven a forklift before. I had driven tractors and gators and things like that. But a forklift, I learned, steers from the back, which is a little different if you’ve never done it before. And you have this pallet of beer in front of you, so you can’t really see through the front.

So I get the beer off the loading dock and start driving it to the brick warehouse, where the door into the building is only about six inches wider than the pallet. So, I come rolling toward the door and — bang — the forklift hits the side of the door, takes out two courses of brick. The beer gets knocked off and half of it breaks. It took me an hour to sweep up. I never bothered to fix that door, though. I figured it I fixed it, I would just hit it again.

Significant mistakes fail to derail novice olive-grower...and some advice on hiring

From the New York Times article "A Second Career, Happily in the Weeds," about retirees who built new careers in agriculture:

Saundra C. Winokur, 74, acknowledges that she lacked a formal plan when she founded Sandy Oaks Olive Orchard in Elmendorf, Tex., in 1997. “I just threw myself into it and learned on the job, though I probably would have not made as many mistakes as I did had I written a business plan,” Ms. Winokur said. If she had written a business plan, however, she might have become discouraged. “There were no olive orchards at the time in Texas,” she said. “It was thought that it couldn’t be done.”

Ms. Winokur, a native Texan who worked as an elementary-school teacher and earned a doctorate in developmental psychology, traveled extensively to research olive production. She noticed that renowned olive-producing regions — southern Spain, southern Italy and Egypt — “looked a lot like Texas.” In 1997, she bought 276 acres of sandy land, which she describes as “oceanfront property without the ocean.”

She planted 450 trees, but lost about half in the first winter because she had yet to master irrigation. Despite that setback, her business has flourished. In addition to producing olive oil, she owns a nursery and a restaurant. Ms. Winokur has had considerable help along the way. Experienced farmers in the area served as mentors. One neighbor briefed her on the history of her land, which had long been fallow when she bought it.

She later received a $98,000 Agriculture Department Value-Added Producer Grant, which helps farmers create derivative products from crops. Ms. Winokur used the money to market her olive-leaf jelly and hire a chef. The grant “gave me that kick-start I needed to move the business to the next level,” she said.

When she started her orchard, Ms. Winokur could hoist 80-pound bags on her own, but she now must rely on employees to handle strenuous chores. She estimates that it took her 13 years to recruit a “first rate” team and advises new farmers to pay well but hire carefully: “Don’t hire because you’re desperate, the first person who comes through the door. Really take your time.”

Entrepreneur's key lesson: learn when to "rip off the Band-Aid" and give up

From, "My Biggest Failure? Failing to Recognize Failure," by Robert J. Moore in the New York Times You're the Boss blog:

In pursuit of big dreams, entrepreneurs miss nights out with friends, days on the beach, and even moments with family.

These sacrifices can create strong emotional ties between founders and their visions, making it difficult to let go. The hard truth is that emotional investment in a business is a sunk cost. It cannot be recovered, and using its existence to justify future investments of time is economically irrational. But try telling that to a passionate founder.

I fell victim to that fallacy soon after SmartRaise was started. The data showed that some of my assumptions had been wrong, and the economics of the business simply would not work. Despite my data-driven DNA, however, I hung on for dear life. After all that work, giving up couldn’t possibly be the best move, could it?

I spent weeks waiting for the data to turn in my favor, programming new features and trying out new marketing tactics. I “pivoted” a few times, but these weren’t true pivots, just small tweaks to the already disproved business model. My emotional immaturity trumped my economic logic, dooming SmartRaise to a slower, more painful death than it deserved.

Today, failure comes much more naturally because I concentrate my emotions on the bigger picture. Failures are educational and contribute to a (far away) life goal of becoming a great entrepreneur. This makes it a bit easier to rip off the Band-Aid when necessary.

If you are spending countless hours on a new project, friends and family will naturally ask you about it. After that, every time you see them they will want an update on how it is going. And who can blame them? Entrepreneurship can be exciting.

This pattern, however, can put you in an uncomfortable spot if you end up walking away from an idea. When I shut down SmartRaise, I dreaded seeing all those inquisitive friends — how would I explain that the site was no more?

What I quickly learned, though, was that no one cared nearly as much as I did. I came to realize that all those people asking for updates were not interested in how SmartRaise was doing — they were interested in how I was doing. I was touched, and they were immediately supportive of my new direction.

Tax preparation pioneer Henry Bloch on the value of starting small

Henry Bloch, founder and former CEO of H&R Block, on an early entrepreneurial lesson (from an interview in Entrepreneur Magazine):

Like so many young entrepreneurs, my brother and I made plenty of mistakes. But I can say with a high degree of certainty, we would not have become as successful as we did had we not made those mistakes and learned from them.

For instance, my brother and I asked our great aunt for a gift of $50,000 to start our venture. She ended up doing us a favor -- she turned us down. Instead, she gave us a loan for $5,000. Had she given us $50,000, we would have failed in a big way. We would have hired a staff to implement a business plan that we later learned was flawed. Without much capital at the beginning, we were forced to start small and, fortunately, to fail small.

My brother and I struggled for eight years before we became successful. We learned a tremendous amount in those years, and I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.

Managing mistakes in business first means acknowledging they happen

Josh Patrick writes this in the New York Times blog You're the Boss:

Allowing mistakes requires that you trust your employees. You must trust that they are doing the best they can — that they aren’t trying to make mistakes. But here’s the thing: If you don’t allow mistakes, they will happen anyway. They’ll just get swept under the rug. When they are discovered, they have often become much larger problems. 

In larger companies, mistakes rarely put the company at risk. In smaller companies, they can be death blows. That’s why some owners overreact when a mistake happens, which was my inclination when I first started in business. Whenever a mistake was made, I would start screaming at whoever had made it — unless, of course, I had made it. In that case, I would pretend the mistake had never happened. It wasn’t until I learned to accept mistakes and start learning from them that our business started to grow.

 Mistakes will happen anyway. It seens obvious, but very few of us are able to recognize this and act accordingly. Recognizing they will happen anyway is the first premise of building a mistake-learning culture.

Starting a business? Dislliking your customers is a crucial mistake

This story is from Steve Blank's post "How Do You Want to Spend the Next 4 Years Of Your Life?," part of his ongoing series of advice to founders:

[As a startup founder,] now that you’ve gotten to know your potential channel and customers, regardless of how much money you’re going to make, will you enjoy working with these customers for the next 3 or 4 years?

One of the largest mistakes in my career was getting this wrong. I used to be in startups where I was dealing with engineers designing our microprocessors or selling supercomputers to research scientists solving really interesting technical problems. But in my next to last company, I got into the video game business.

My customers were 14-year old boys. (see 1:30 in the video) I hated them. It was a lifelong lesson that taught me to never start a business where you hate your customers. It never goes well. You don’t want to talk to them. You don’t want to do Customer Development with them. You just want them to go away. And in my case they did – they didn’t buy anything.

So you and your team need to feel comfortable being in this business with these customers.

The video Steve refers to is below:

Founders who sold or didn't sell reflect on their decisions

In the New York Times, this article provides a very cool window into the minds of entrepreneurs who sold (or didn't sell) their companies. The founders' recollections provide a glimpse into some deep stuff, including how our significant decisions look upon reflection, what is a mistake, etc. Here's PayPal co-founder Max Levchin recalling his next startup experience:

His next company, Slide, was a different story. It made social apps and sold to Google for $228 million. Google shut it down a year later.

“The honest truth about Slide was we were a five-year-old company that had wandered through the desert for a long time wondering what business to be in,” said Mr. Levchin, who later started a new software company, HVF. “I wanted to top PayPal and it didn’t work.”

And here's Ben Horowitz on selling the company he co-founded, Opsware:

“I spent eight years, all day every day, trying to build this thing, and all of a sudden it’s gone, it’s just over,” he said. “It’s a little bit like something dies.

“That decision was one of the most isolated and alone decisions you ever make,” said Mr. Horowitz, who now advises entrepreneurs as a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz. “On the surface it looked good, but I tell you after I sold the company I had total seller’s remorse.”

And Philippe Courtout on cc:Mail:

Mr. Courtot received a second acquisition offer, this time from Lotus Development for $55 million in cash.

Under Lotus, cc:Mail grew from four million users to 24 million, until IBM acquired Lotus in 1995 and shut down cc:Mail. Microsoft Mail eventually became Outlook.

“I should not have sold,” said Mr. Courtot, who is now chairman and chief executive of Qualys, a security company that went public last year. “That was my biggest regret. We could have moved much, much faster and brought it to the cloud. But such is life.”

Story: Startups, don't focus on competition. Instead, "make your own business work"

Very cool post from Brett Martin in which he provides a candid postmortem on his tech startup company, Sonar. There are lots of great mistake stories in the piece; here's one:

In the run up to SXSW 2012 when the insider media had fabricated Highlight as heir to the throne and some of our more fair weather investors had written us off, my confidence was against the ropes. We reordered our roadmap to rush out comparable features but were now BEHIND. I put on my best brave face but inside my gut was rotting away. I still remember thinking on the flight to Austin “fck, we had it, and now we are going to lose it.”

Oops! Highlight never went anywhere but we definitely wasted a ton of energy and sleep “responding to the threat” when we should have been figuring out how to make our own business work.

Lesson Learned:

Be steady at the wheel. The only way one startup can kill another startup is by getting into the other’s head and leading them off a cliff.

If you don’t believe me, try this proof. Are your competitors releasing a bunch of the same features that you have on your roadmap? Yes? Do you know what consumers want*? No? Great, then neither do your competitors. Get back to figuring out what users want!

*Hint: If you did, you would already have traction.

Hat tip Failcon.

Startups - is it all about execution... or timing?

Mistake stories are amazing resources because you can easily get 30 minutes of valuable dialogue out of a 3-minute story. They are that full of information and insight. One reason is their complexity - they defy easy conclusions or snap judgments. Here's an example - two stories that seem to demonstrate exact opposite truths!

The first is from Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, from his upcoming book, "How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big." The excerpt is from the Wall Street Journal:

In the 1970s, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college, I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea.

But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas that I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.

The second is the high-drama depiction of the Twitter founding story as excerpted in the New York Times magazine. Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist and early investor in the company reacted to the Times excerpt:

So why does the Twitter story remind me [that life is unfair]? Because it demonstrates the relative importance of hitting upon the right thing at the right time over early execution. This goes a bit against one of the historic ideas held dear in venture capital that execution matters more than ideas. And yes it remains true that an idea alone is worthless, you have to build something. But beyond that it turns out that building the right thing at the right time will let you get away with all sorts of mistakes. Conversely, hypothetically perfect execution but too early or too late or on the wrong variant will not get you very far.

Who's right? It may depend on your own situation. Certainly, if you're involved in a startup, you could do worse than invest a half-hour discussing these stories and the relative impacts of idea quality, timing, luck and execution with your co-founder. But you may also consider these additional words from Wenger: "Somewhere somebody right now is building the next big thing and most likely it is not you. Just accept that and you’ll be happier."

Paul Graham unveils communication around the Union Square Ventures mistake not to invest in AirBnb

Y Combinator partner Paul Graham has shared the entire email correspondence relating to Fred Wilson and USV considering an early investment in AirBnb, now likely a $1B+ valued enterprise. The email story is here, and it is absolutely fascinating to me because I loved Fred's recounting of his mistake in declining to invest those few years ago, which I wrote about here, and in the book.

I spent some time this week talking to startups as part of the 99u Pop-Up School, and this story is essential reading for anyone trying to launch something brand-new. My favorite quote is from one of Fred's emails:

It's interesting

Our two junior team members were enthusiastic

The three "old guys" didn't get it

The positive outcome of a product development failure

Karsten Strauss, writing on Forbes.com, discussed the journey of Zach and Max Zitney, the undergraduate creators of MiRing, a Bluetooth-enabled ring that would vibrate when the wearer's phone rang or received a text message.

The product, despite placing third in an Ohio State University entrepreneur's competition, far undershot its goal on crowdfunding site Fundable.com - raising $8000 in pledges versus a goal of $150,000. A failure? Yes, but not an ending.

Max Zitney’s outlook is that the disappointing campaign saved the two a lot of grief because it showed them that the product, in its current configuration, was obviously not sparking a lot of enthusiasm.

But the Zitneys’ story doesn’t end by merely recognizing the silver lining. A UK-based company called NFC Ring, which has developed a similar idea, approached the brothers, offering to inspect their concept and possibly collaborate in the near future....

NFC Ring appreciated the Zitneys’ idea but said the technology is not yet in place to create a ring-size, Bluetooth-enabled vibrating notification device. Those features, however, are ones that the company would like to incorporate into its product . “They said that’s their ultimate goal,” said Zach Zitney, adding that NFC Ring intends to resume talks with the brothers when they’re ready to start integrating MiRing’s designs into their own technology. Given the fact that the Zitneys have a U.S. patent on such a gadget, they may have to.

“There are still options available,” Max Zitney said. “The crowdfunding just opened up the doors for us.”

So: failure, especially cheap and fast failure, does not mean that a project is finished. It may just be a step on the way. The Zitneys did not achieve their funding goal, but the crowdfunding project exposed them to new opportunities and proved to them that going it alone would not be a success - an example of an "intelligent failure."

Hat tip Roxanne Persaud.

VC Ed Sim: "Never give up but move on quickly"

The title is from a 2011 post from Ed's blog Beyond VC. At first (and maybe second) glance this is a paradox. At the heart of this paradox is one of the deeper secrets for learning from mistakes. Let's deconstruct it:

"Never give up..." This is a mantra repeated over and over again on this site, including Garr Reynolds's "Fall down 7 times, get up 8" and Angela Duckworth's discussions of grit. Persistence is essential to power past stumbles, failures, criticism, ridicule - all conditions that come before worthwhile successes.

...but move on quickly" - this refers to the ability to maturely sniff out a situation that is heading for failure, and not devote endless work cycles to trying to pull a success from the jaws of failure. Overall success requires diagnosing, with evidence, counsel and your own intuition, the smaller failures that come up along the way, and shifting your approach quickly after the diagnosis comes in.

"Never give up but move on quickly" is one of the Scylla-Charybdis balancing acts (per Albert Wenger) necessary to be a good entrepreneur or really senior leader of any kind.

VC Mark Suster learns from a failed pursuit of a venture investment

Mark Suster's "Both Sides of the Table" blog is a great resource for startups and managers. I found a 2010 post in which he outlined the positive value of losing - its ability to teach deep lessons. Here's one of the two stories he tells in the post:

Last year I lost a deal in a company that I wanted to invest in and that I thought I should have won. I was angry – mostly at myself. Rather than blame the team that I thought should have chosen me, I became reflective. They were in LA and I was in LA. They had a prominent NorCal investor already so I thought a SoCal lead would make sense – that I could help them in a more hands-on way. They had agreed!

I had lost a previous deal where the team said they liked me but didn’t know my partners well enough so I promised myself never to let that happen again.

So I organized a team dinner with all four of my partners and all three of their founders. I wanted to be sure that they knew how much all of our partners loved what they were doing with their company. I wanted to be sure that they felt they knew all of my partners well so they could see why I joined up with them in the first place – they are smart guys who have a 20-year track record of winning. 15 companies North of $1 billion exit. And they are normal, down-to-earth people as well.

After dinner on a Thursday night I thought we had the deal and that the team knew how hard I would work on their behalf if I were chosen. By Monday morning after their board meeting in NorCal I didn’t get a return phone call. I knew what this meant. Good news always comes quickly, bad news takes time to simmer. By the time I got through to the guys on Tuesday we had lost.

I knew that the, “I’m really sorry” message was coming. I embraced it with honor and didn’t give them a hard time. But I obviously asked, “Why did it happen? I need to learn for next time.”

There were two main reasons that I could distill from their kind words of solace: 1) the existing NorCal investor didn’t know me well enough & 2) the new NorCal investor had a good knowledge of and presence in China, which they believed would be critical.

I decided to put both of those issues to bed in 2010. I came several times to NorCal (where I grew up, actually) and went and met several partners from each Silicon Valley firm. I didn’t want this to happen again – that people didn’t know me. I also made several trips to New York & Boston. Next year I’m going to spend time in Seattle and Boulder in addition. I realized that it is not enough to know one partner per firm and it is not enough for only the management team to like you. VCs have a seat at the table in deciding future investors.

I also spent two weeks in China and vowed to make it back frequently. China is indelibly an important part of the future of the global technology system. Although I had lived and worked in more than 10 countries – it wasn’t good enough. I didn’t know the one that mattered most to their future. And for my own good I vowed to have relationships in China and knowledge of the local markets. I’m not looking to invest there – I’m looking to understand the trends, the people, the innovation, the regions and how China can become an integral part of any of my portfolio companies as they scale.

"Glass Half-Empty" - managers should focus on things that aren't working

From Adam Bryant's interview with Sunny Gupta, CEO of Apptio, in the New York Times:

We have this phrase that I use a lot: “glass half-empty.” My marketing guys wanted me to change it to “continuous improvement.” But I said to them that “glass half-empty” is not gloomy. It’s all about how, every single day, maybe 85 percent of things are going right, and there are 15 percent that aren’t going right. And if we have an hour, I’d rather focus on the 15 percent that are not going right, because that’s how you become great.

It’s hard for people to get behind that principle because my sense — having managed a lot of people — is that human beings are generally driven by a desire to be recognized every single day. And I absolutely believe recognition is important and you’ve got to recognize people. The culture has to be set right from Day 1 that we are going to recognize you, but our culture also has this maniacal focus on the things that are not working. People can get frustrated because they feel like you may be attacking them or always asking them about the things that are not working.

Andre Durand: make sure startup fundraising and ambitions are aligned

Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity, in his interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, discussed a mistake in his early entrepreneurial ventures:

My aspirations were always bigger early on than our resources. The way that manifested itself was that I never raised enough money early on to make money less of a factor in the way we made decisions. That meant I was either always pressured to ship software that wasn’t quite ready, which is a little bit of a death spiral, or I was always raising money within a few days of payroll — and asking the employees to trust me and to not quit.

So I was trying to be bigger than I could afford to be, and your decision-making is always convoluted by these factors. That was a big early lesson. It ingrained in me the importance of matching the entrepreneurial aspirations with the resources. Those all have to be aligned. And ever since, I’ve always raised money when I don’t need it ahead of time, for a rainy day. I just never put myself in that position again.

Dan Isenberg failure story - the photo-printing company undone by the dot-com collapse

Dan Isenberg is the executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project and the author of the great new book "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value." As part of our longer interview (available here), after discussing the pros and cons of the culture of celebrating failure, Dan related his own failure story and what he learned from it. He talks about a startup that grew quickly and imploded ever faster than that in the crazy dot-com bubble era of 2000-2001.

Dan Isenberg's online photo printing story (4 minutes).

The failed venture. Lessons from the failure - the sixth sense of business danger; the speed of failure; reading the macro situation; the "Dersu Uzala" story.

Examining reasons for startup failure within the founder's mind

Tom Eisenmann posts over at Platforms and Networks on founder-related reasons for startup failure. It's a great summary post, with lots of useful links, including lessons from MBank favorites Steve Blank, Mark Suster and Jerry Colonna. Here's a taste:

If entrepreneurial success hinges on a founder’s mastery of psychology, it stands to reason that a founder’s flawed ego is often the root cause of startup failure.

Categorizing causes of entrepreneurial failure is tricky. Asking entrepreneurs why their venture failed doesn’t always yield reliable answers. To bolster our fragile egos, we credit our successes to our own brilliance and skill, and we attribute our failures to the shortcomings of others or to events outside our control. This pattern is so deeply ingrained that psychologists have labeled it the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Furthermore, just as a living organism might die for many reasons—for example, hunger, predation, or illness—startup failure has diverse causes. Paul Graham cites 18 reasons why startups fail; in her post, What Goes Wrong, reprinted in Managing Startups, Graham’s partner at Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, warns founders that they must navigate a “tunnel full of monsters that kill.”

The post is well worth reading in full.

Flipboard's Mike McCue: at Netscape, focusing on competition over customers was a mistake

From McCue's interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times:

One of the biggest mistakes I made at Netscape was to focus too much on competition. Microsoft was trying to kill us. And that caused us to think about what we were going to do about Microsoft. What we really should have been thinking was: How do we focus on what our users want? Why did they love our product? How do we make it more of something that they love? So my advice is, every time you have a thought about the competition, replace that with a thought about your customer and you’ll do far better as a business.

A coda to the story is that Netscape was "killed" by Microsoft despite Netscape's focus on trying to counter their competition. The lesson is that a customer focus might have done better.

"Better Place" bankruptcy as a component of broader trial-and-error process?

There has been much written on the recent bankruptcy filing of A Better Place, a company proposing to drive adoption of all-electric cars by creating a battery-swapping infrastructure - extending the range of electric cars without a lengthy wait to recharge.

Is Better Place's demise the end of the story? Saul Kaplan doesn't think so. In his post at Fortune Magazine's site, Kaplan discusses what the company's failure means, and answers the company's many after-the-fact critics:

The "I told you so crowd" immediately started taking shots. New York Times columnist David Brooks took a swing directly at Agassi calling him a "brilliant technology entrepreneur" but implying that he was among "conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations but have turned out to be marginal in history." Ouch. Easy for David Brooks to criticize others for sharing their point of view at conferences when he leverages a New York Times platform to do the same thing.

He points to Tesla's announcement of battery-swapping trials as evidence that the model is far from dead:

Tesla is going to test stations where Model-S owners can swap batteries in 90 seconds for $50-60, less time and money than filling up a tank of gas. Bold business models don't die; they just get reinvented. If we want to go from best practice to next practice we have to try more stuff. We learn more from efforts that don't work than from those that do. So instead of piling on those that try to do bold things without initial success or criticizing those that share their paradigm shifting ideas publicly, we should thank them for pushing us forward and providing the knowledge to try again, only better the next time.

As we've discussed here, trial and error is not a random process; within a constrained problem definition, failures reduce the subsequent exploration that's needed to solve the problem. A Better Place didn't work, but that's not the end of the story. Battery-swapping may very well work, in time.

Bessemer Venture Partners celebrates its missed opportunities

Legendary Silicon Valley venture capital fund Bessemer Venture Partners publishes, on its website, its "anti-portfolio," containing investments it could have made, but chose not to. These investments are as star-studded a portfolio as you can imagine, a testament to the difficulty of picking investments in startups. As Daniel Isenberg wrote in "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," "Entrepreneurship and the process of betting on it may be impossible to systematize, precisely because of its contrarian nature."

BVP's successful investments include Skype, Staples, LinkedIn, Celtel and Yelp. Its missed opportunities include these:

Google: Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

Lotus & Compaq: Ben Rosen, one of the founders of Sevin Rosen, offered Felda Hardymon the chance to invest in both Lotus and Compaq Computer on the same day. Says Hardymon: "Lotus wasn't proven yet, and I was worried about the situation there. As for Compaq, I told him there was no real future in transportable computers since IBM could do it."

eBay: "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding," thought Cowan. "No-brainer pass."

And more are available on the site. (Thanks to Dan Isenberg for referring to this list in "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid.")

Bravo to the BVP Partners for sharing their list and their sense of humor.