I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It was something of a personal challenge for me to come up with a business suitable for the Internet world and the Internet age.
The beauty of the Internet is there's a niche market for everything, and if you can focus on it, you can build a sustainable and viable business of it.
Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
When you are just starting out with an online business, there's a good chance that you'll be making several mistakes. Because of the mistakes that can be made with starting an online business, many people decide to quit or think that online businesses are just a scam.
I never said I enjoy anything about using the Internet. I enjoy helping the entrepreneurs who are building this thing that I don't necessarily like or use.
I've been managing Internet businesses since 1999. That's 12 years of being in the tornado, and it's pretty exhausting. I'll be looking at the next challenge, but in terms of operating an Internet business, I've scratched that itch very well.
I ended up buying business.com for $150,000 because I wanted to make it a magazine. It would have been a 'Time'-type magazine: how to do business on the Internet. And I was offered a lot of money for that domain. I played two buyers against each other.
Over many generations, fortunes in the business world were made through buying and selling products in physical stores. Internet fortunes have been made buying and selling products online.
I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.
When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.