"Moderate profits fill the purse."
Italian Proverb
His name: Christian Owens. His age: 16. He made his first million dollars in two years, "inspired by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs". This is how he did it.
The British teen—who lives in Corby, Northamptonshire—got his first computer age seven. Three years later he got a Mac and taught himself web design. Four years later—at age 14, in 2008—he started his first company. It was a simple site that some of you may know: Mac Bundle Box. The site was pretty, rooted into Apple's own design guidelines and style.
The page sold a package of very neat Mac OS X applications for a discounted price and for a limited time. He would negotiate with the developers to get a discount deal on their apps. The resulting bundle had a combined retail value of around $400, but he would sell it for a tenth of that price.
Not only that: If enough people bought the package, a new application would get unlocked for all buyers, which guaranteed very good word-of-mouth promotion. And to top it all, Owens dedicated a percentage of all sales to charity.
The idea did well. Very well, in fact: In its first two years, Mac Bundle Box made $1,000,000 (700,000 British Pounds).
Not happy with that success, Owens jumped into a new venture called Branchr, a pay-per-click advertising company that distributes 300 million ads per month on over 17,500 websites, iPhone, and Android applications. The company, which claims to deliver "contextual, behavioral, publisher-defined, and geographically" targeted ads in those platforms, has already made $800,000 in its first year and employs eight adults including his 43-year-old mother, Alison.
He doesn't know where he would be in 10 years, but the next thing he wants to do is to make one hundred million British pounds with Branchr. He seems to be on his way to success. He claims his business is growing strong—Branchr has already bought another company—and he reinvests all the money back into the company.
His secret to success?Hidden Content:
I keep coming back to Silicon Valley in California because it is such an instructive place to think about how businesses are created - and maybe thrive.
For decades now, a stream of start-up companies have grown big and influential in the Valley, built around the silicon chip and the new economy created by computing.
Clustered around all the skills a start-up business needs - the backers, advisors, lawyers, and venture capitalists - the little towns that make up most of the Valley are a magnet for the brightest minds from all over the world, drawn by instinct to a place where things happen.
Fascinating, therefore, to stumble on a building which is a microcosm of Silicon Valley as a whole.
Rugs
It's run by Saeed Amidi, whose family fled from the Iranian revolution in the 1970s. He went to business college in the Valley and was shocked when his father suggested that he should start working for a living.
The family had opened a Persian rug shop in the main street in the rich little city of Palo Alto, just down the road from Stanford University and the vast concentration of wealth controlled by the venture capitalists in Sand Hill Road.
The shop, Medallion Rugs, is still there. It's a good place to run into start-up business people who have just made a fortune by floating their new companies.
They need floor coverings for their new house - one of the things that newly wealthy people buy.
Saeed Amidi got on with starting his own businesses: real estate, investment, and a water bottling company.
Eventually he bought the non-descript premises further up the street that he was running his operations from - 165 University Avenue.
Success stories
When I first saw it - something like 10 years ago - it still had a sticker on the front from a recent tenant: Google.
Before Google, it was the offices of the global computer peripheral specialists Logitech, originally from Switzerland, and famous still for their webcams, keyboards and mice.
Successful start-ups don't stay very long at 165 University Avenue. The premises, laid out round an upper floor courtyard, are fine when you have only 20 employees but get crowded if you grow to 60, which is what new businesses tend to do, fast.
After Google moved out, the internet payments company Paypal and the mobile phones developer Danger came along. Both made their founders and backers hundreds of millions of dollars a few years after they moved on from 165 University Avenue, by selling themselves to bigger companies.
And the savvy landlord Saeed Amidi insisted on taking a small stake in Paypal along with the rent.
With a record of canny investment behind him, he's now leasing office space to even more start-ups in larger premises nearby, hoping that the luck of 165 University Avenue can rub off on a new generation of entrepreneurs.
When it comes to staring a business, you can't neglect the influence of luck.
Among Cialdini's insights were these:
1) We instinctively try to reciprocate when someone does something for us.
2) Once we've made a commitment to do something, we strive to be consistent with that decision.
3) We tend to look to others to determine what our decision should be in any given situation.
4) We prefer to say yes to the requests of people we know and like.
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