Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

Funny thing I will start by saying that I wouldn’t probably have bought this book on my own, because from the title you don’t get that there is a genuine story behind of one of the greatest US entrepreneurs. That’s why receiving books for reviews have been always great!

With much of our knowledge about US entrepreneurship coming from the movie industry, great entrepreneurship stories escape the public, although they represent the real American dream. Unlike other books I’ve read lately, many following the getting rich quick book pattern I was happy to see that Sam’s Wyly book doesn’t follow a script. Each chapter starts and ends on it’s own, without having the same structure with the others, while the book itself it’s not what you could call motivational, nor “selling” ways to turn $1,000 into millions. The truth and wisdom you could find reading the chapters are not replicable, you can’t build your business the same. But they might make you smarter and give you some insights of the hard work that an entrepreneur needs to put in order to achieve his goals.

Did you know that Sam Wyly was amongst the first to fight IBM during their supremacy years in the ‘60 when a computer was costing around $ 3 million? Did you know that Sam Wyly fought the big AT&T monopoly when you couldn’t even buy a different headset and lost 100 million to it? Did you know that he owned the Bonanza food chain and grow it from 20 restaurants to more than 600? Did you know that Sam started a company called Sterling Software with an initial investment of 2 million to sell it later for… 8 billions! Just before the dot com crash.

In the early 1970s, in the midst of the Nixon wage and price controls, Wyly built University Computing into a goliath that split into four separate companies, including Datran, which would later challenge the AT&T data transmission monopoly. During the gas crisis of the late 1970s, Sam’s oil-refining and silver mining company Earth Resources actually took advantage of the call to de-lead gasoline by selling the refinement run-off for jet fuel. During the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sam built arts & crafts retailer Michaels from six stores to over 900. In the current economic downturn, Sam’s latest ventures are all proving successful. From Green Mountain Energy, the nation’s leading provider of cleaner energy, to investment funds Ranger Capital and Maverick Capital, Sam’s still on the leading edge of the market.

As Sam Wyly says, he was born in one of the poorest small towns in US. His first business, University Computing was started with $1,000 and an idea. He is amongst the 600 most rich people now, but he keeps on saying: “In football, just like in business and just like in life, the best teacher of all is failure.” “No matter who you are or what you’ve achieved in the past, you have to work hard every time in order to win. ”

I’m not sure how much you know about how the Internet appeared, but I now know that by fighting AT&T and creating the first data transmission service for computers, Sam Wyly set the first stone of what we call today Internet, even before the army launched the project that will later become the internet. And not sure how the world would be today without entrepreneurs fighting big corporations like IBM and finding better ways of solving people pains – the quite essence of what we call today entrepreneurship.

Consider it a history book about the last century economics, consider it a business book, it definitively worth reading. Thanks Sam Wyly for sharing a true and genuine entrepreneurship story: 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire