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…
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,…
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…
“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…
