Adele

Real money stories of founders and billionaires. One a day.

[Adele @adelltells]

In 1995, Jeff Bezos told his parents there was a 70% chance they'd lose the $245,573 they were about to invest in Amazon.

He wasn't the only one.

9 founders who bet everything before anyone believed them, with the real numbers: https://t.co/mpEKaCp1AB

[Adele @adelltells]

@focuzzz_01 exactly. the best deals usually look stupid at the time. if it had looked like the future of TV, $50 million would never have been on the table

[Adele @adelltells]

In 2000, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 million. Nine years later, Reed Hastings admitted: "If it hadn't been for their debt, they could have killed us."

Netflix back then was a DVD-by-mail company that was losing money. Blockbuster had about 9,000 stores and $6 billion a year in revenue.

The founders offered to sell. "They laughed us out of their office," former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy said later.

Hastings has said the idea for Netflix came from paying $40 in Blockbuster late fees.

In 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.

In the video below, co-founder Marc Randolph tells the story of that meeting himself.

Would you have bought Netflix for $50 million in 2000?

[Adele @adelltells]

In 1995, Jeff Bezos told his parents there was a 70% chance they'd lose the $245,573 they were about to invest in Amazon.

He wasn't the only one.

9 founders who bet everything before anyone believed them, with the real numbers: https://t.co/mpEKaCp1AB

[Adele @adelltells]

@0xPoPsik honest answer, and probably what blockbuster thought too. the late fees were the business, so netflix looked like a company built to kill their best revenue

[Adele @adelltells]

@SuccessDecodedX honest take from a founder. most would claim the win, he credited their debt

[Adele @adelltells]

@focuzzz_01 the stunt aged badly, but the instinct behind it didn't. he always knew how to make a crowd show up

[Adele @adelltells]

@zerodoubts0 $48,612 vs $12.5 million on the same books. when two sides are 257x apart, nobody was looking at the same numbers to begin with

[Adele @adelltells]

@garygyfy the cut was easier for him because of the other rule. if you live on side income and never touch the big paycheck, giving half of it up doesn't change your life at all

[Adele @adelltells]

@RumiMirage the real mistake was mixing the two roles. when your husband is also your manager, the divorce isn't just personal, it's a business breakup with a prenup nobody fully trusted

[Adele @adelltells]

@MykhailenkoFin that's the irony. hastings has said the idea came from paying $40 in blockbuster late fees. the thing that funded their stores is what started their killer

[Adele @adelltells]

@gosh_sol_eth less than 1% of a year's revenue for them. and the funny part is hastings later admitted blockbuster could still have beaten them even after saying no. "if it hadn't been for their debt, they could have killed us"

[Adele @adelltells]

@Orvexiumx easy to say now 😄 in 2000 it was a DVD-by-mail company losing money. blockbuster had 9,000 stores and $6 billion a year

[Adele @adelltells]

@huginalpha the part that scares me is the faked statements. he was getting reports every month that looked fine. most people would never check further than that

[Adele @adelltells]

@0xLedgerlab "not in the lobby?" is the most grandma line of all time

[Adele @adelltells]

@zento0x the forged will is the part that gets me. she filed it in his name and left everything to herself. underneath all of it, this was about money

[Adele @adelltells]

@byMirum somewhere a studio exec is already pricing out "chuck norris vs predator" as a real movie

[Adele @adelltells]

@geravita_waw the whole brand was sold as a fantasy, and the people inside it are only now telling what it cost them. a lot of empires look different once the people who built them can talk

[Adele @adelltells]

@0x_kern the money is in that line about the cores sitting idle. you pay for 989 trillion operations a second and with one user most of it just waits on memory. that's why AI companies cram as many users as they can onto each chip

[Adele @adelltells]

@Synthexfr same rule as hiring. a bad process with 10 new people is just 10 people making the same mistake faster

[Adele @adelltells]

@sayonaracash the scary part is the money side. a fake rooftop, a fake girl, and somewhere a real person sending real savings to "her"

[Adele @adelltells]

@fintrixai a legend who kept exactly one share just to keep showing up 😄

[Adele @adelltells]

Apple fired Steve Jobs at 30, and he sold every Apple share he owned except one. That last share let him keep going to the shareholder meetings.

In 1985 the board sided with John Sculley, the CEO Jobs had brought in himself. "What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating," he said years later.

In 2016, Business Insider calculated the stake he sold would have been worth about $66 billion.

So he started over. He founded NeXT, and for $5 million he bought a small graphics unit from George Lucas called Pixar. In 1995 Pixar released Toy Story and went public, which made Jobs a billionaire.

A year later Apple was losing money and bought NeXT for about $400 million. Jobs came back with the deal and soon ran the company again.

In 2006 Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion. Jobs ended up with almost 8% of Disney, the largest individual stake in the company.

"Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

[Adele @adelltells]

In 1995, Jeff Bezos told his parents there was a 70% chance they'd lose the $245,573 they were about to invest in Amazon.

He wasn't the only one.

9 founders who bet everything before anyone believed them, with the real numbers: https://t.co/mpEKaCp1AB