How To Lose $850 Million And Not Really Care

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...
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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 10 Jun 2002 @ 9:38am

    No Subject Given

    Dang, that's three new york times links - why not just change the name of this site to nytimes.com, and set it up to be an official mirror site?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Bill, 10 Jun 2002 @ 9:42pm

    From the other horse's mouth

    As a former employee and someone who spent some time with Toby Lenk, I posted my thoughts here:

    http://www.rini.org/article623.html

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 11 Jun 2002 @ 10:06am

    Re: No Subject Given

    test

    link to this | view in thread ]


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