On August 4th, 2014, Zach and I officially started a company we named, on a whim, Book In A Box. It’d been a side project, but that was the day that it became real. Over the next 7 years, the company has published 923 books (and counting), it got a new name (Scribe Media), a…
Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about firing myself as CEO of my company (covered in the press here and here, among other places). So what’s happened in the 5 years since I replaced myself as CEO of Scribe Media? Was it a good decision or not? Let’s begin by looking at the big…
I started angel investing almost by accident, which sounds strange to say. Who “accidentally” invests tens of thousands of dollars into highly speculative ventures? Well, I did. A friend introduced me to Clayton Christopher who was raising money for his new liquor company Deep Eddy. Their first product, a sweet tea vodka, was amazing and…
I was at dinner the other night, and got a question I get all the time: “What was it like to play basketball with Obama? What’s he like?” Here we go again, another Obama basketball question. First, let me explain how I even knew Barack Obama: I attended the University of Chicago from 1995 to…
Seriously: who the fuck am I to tell you how to start a company? What do I know? Well, I’ve done it myself several times, and the story of my most recent start-up shows every principle in action. It all started with a simple question from a frustrated entrepreneur. “I want a book, but I…
When I was first getting into entrepreneurship, I asked Mark Cuban what he read or studied to learn how to start and build businesses. His response: “Experience. It’s the only reliable teacher I’ve ever had. No books ever captured what it’s really like. You just gotta do it.” Mark’s smarter than me on most things,…
“Evil isn’t done so often by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves.”-Reinhold Niebuhr My first post in this series was about my start-up and business failures. When I was done, I felt proud of myself. I was proud of my honesty and vulnerability, because five years ago–maybe even one year…
For most start-ups, getting to product-market fit is the hardest part. For us, it was easy; it pretty much came by accident. We did 200k in our first two months, and 450k in 5 months–with just two pieces of media and two people in the company doing everything. This is insane growth, especially for a…
Originally posted on Tim Ferriss’s blog: I first met Tim when he came to my SXSW presentation (about turning a blog into a book) to pick my brain about what had worked for me. I explained to him everything I did, and he loved the advice so much he bought me a coffee. Thanks, big…
I’m no longer the CEO of Scribe (formerly Book In A Box). Why? We didn’t do a good enough job being an executive and manager of a fast scaling team. In fact, we did so poorly that we almost screwed up a “can’t miss” idea with a huge market. The man we hired to replace us…
