Cool bio of a guy I know from college
There are so many negative forces out there in the business world. Who knows how many businesses fail due to circumstances, bad timing, bad luck, bashers, or just loss of motivation.
My personal success in life and in trading doesn't come from being smart, lucky, or rich. It comes from my ability to take a beating without dying first of all, and without giving up.
Here is a bio about a guy I know from back at UT who could take a beating and jump right back up with a smile on his face. I'll get back up for the next round, but I definitely have problems with that smiling part. Maybe that's why he is printing multi millions and I'm just a trader. I'll be there one day.
http://www.business.txstate.edu/users/jb15/MG...keVita.htm
Alan Blake established himself as an entrepreneur at an early age. While only 21 and a student at the University of Texas at Austin, he launched his first company, called ClassMap . The company hosted professor web sites (similar to Blackboard, Inc.) and was an online vehicle for helping college students learn more in less time. He raised $4,000,000 in venture capital and eventually employed 50 people. The concept was solid, but the timing was bad. The company folded at the height of the dot com bust.
Despite his first company’s failure, Alan did not give up on his entrepreneurial dream. He immediately started a new company in a market even riskier than dotcoms: biotech pets. Specifically, Alan identified an opportunity to establish a market for vibrantly colored genetically modified fish that would appear to glow different colors under a black light.
Alan started GloFish (www.glofish.com) in his apartment with little initial funding and lots of skepticism from his friends and family. In spite of the enormous obstacles, he secured the complex intellectual property, addressed massive state and national regulatory issues, and then created a demand for his unique product. All of this caught the media’s attention. Alan and his biotech fish received 500,000,000 media impressions (the number of times someone saw, read, or heard about GloFish ) as soon as they were released! This exposure included Alan’s appearance on many national news shows and the New York Times claiming that the launch of GloFish marked the beginning of the consumer biotech age.
Now sold in Wal-Mart, and PETCO, GloFish has become such a cultural icon that mainstream entertainment from “I, Robot” to Michael Crichton’s novel Next have featured his fish. They have also been displayed in a variety of public aquariums around the globe.
Never satisfied with “good enough”, Alan is currently leading the launch of a new company that will facilitate direct shipment of GloFish aquariums to the consumer. Using a “just add water” approach, 1-800-GloFish, LLC, will launch in February and delivery the GloFish and a complete GloKit aquarium right to the consumer’s front door in a single package. By implementing a never before tried business model, 1-800-GloFish is sure to make a huge splash!
