Bit of a vague title so let me elaborate: what I’m looking for are interesting stories of people who made serious money in unconventional and clever ways. You can make a case for nearly any millionaire having done that, but I’m looking for things like people who bought up a load of domain names in the 1990s and then made a killing selling them to bigger companies when they came along. That’s the kind of thing I’m hoping we can discuss here.
I don’t like to admit it but I’m the kind of guy who can get rather jealous of people who made a lot of money, but something like predicting the internet getting huge and capitalizing on it the way I described above strikes me as so cunning I can’t help but admire it, and I was hoping some of you might know of similar stories throughout history. Another vague example so you have the idea is the occasional stories (myths?) of people who created or invented a product with the possibility of ruining an existing product, and then sold their invention to that company for a massive sum. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for us to discuss in this thread.
There really aren’t any rules to this thread as I don’t want to discourage anyone from replying. Anyone who made around a million bucks or more in a way you would consider both unconventional or strange but also somewhat or completely brilliantly is fair game here, although please refrain from posting what we might call “inevitable” inventions, such as the telephone, which was certainly clever but perhaps not entirely unconventional. If you can think of an invention that satisfies both criteria, post away! And of course, any other plans, schemes and whatnot, noble or nasty, should be posted too.
I’m not sure if many people who did that actually made any real money. Espcially since there seem to be a ton of “make money buying and selling domain names” articles on the web.
Not really sure what you mean by this. There are certainly plenty of cases of “disruptive technologies”. But usually they become successful business and the industries they disrupt just sort of adapt or whither away on their own.
They only became “inevitable” after someone invented them.
It sounds like what you are really looking for are scams, or close to them. Like in the 90s I read about a kid who made a couple hundred thousand buying and selling stock on the internet (a new phenomenon at the time). But he would bombard finance message boards with fake new about the stock to drive the price up and down.
Robert Stiller. He’s the founder of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. Which, on top of just being a huge coffee company also currently owns the Keurig coffee system (they bought it a few years back).
What makes him somewhat unconventional is where he got the money to found the coffee company. Back in 1980 or so, when he was in college he used to watch his friends do the same thing we all did. Take two rolling papers, glue them together and then roll it sideways so you’d have one big one instead of trying to fumble around with that little piece of paper. So he invented the EZ Wider. A bigger, wider rolling paper. He made his first few million dollars doing that.
How about Hamdi Ulukaya? I doubt that you’ve heard of him, but he’s the guy behind Chobani brand Greek-style yogurt. He started the company less than eight years ago, after buying a closed Kraft yogurt plant and now has the number-one yogurt brand in America. It outsells Yoplait and Dannon and other brands. (My prediction is that he’s going to be bought out sooner or later by Groupe Danone or Kraft.)
I have to hand it to people who mad money selling “important” WWW domains back in the early days of the Web. They saw what was about to happen and figured out and easy way to make a buck off it.
I was active on USENET in the early 90s and I remember people talking about doing it and i never bothered to take the time to look into doing it myself. These days people can either sue or work around it but back in the 90s many companies just paid those guys off.
I think the story of Duck Commander is kind of unconventional.
Star college quarterback turns down the NFL in favor of duck hunting season. Develops some sort of new way to make a duck call. Yadda yadda millionaire.
Real estate. I know a guy who became a multi-millionaire. He bought decrepit old houses in the South End of Boston. In the late 1970’s the area was a crime ridden slum-he had faith, and bought several 3 story “brownstone” townhouses, and renovated them-he paid about $20,000 each. Today, they are worth over $1.5 million each.
But he had to wait almost 20 years for his investment to pay off.
Could you do the same in a city like Detroit? The risks are huge, but the payoff could be huge.
Buy all kinds of stuff that is out of fashion…and wait.
Charles Saatchi, advertising mogul, made tons of money buying and selling modern art.
One example:
In 1991 he bought a frozen sculpture of Marc Quinn’s head filled with 9 pints of the artist’s blood, for $22,000, then sold it in 2005 for $2.7 million, according to the Guardian*
source: Forbes.com.
side note: I actually saw that sculpture when it was in the Saatchi Gallery.
Bill Gates made billions founding a firm that specialized in software at a time (1975) when the conventional wisdom was that you could only make money in computers by focusing on hardware.
Nobody thought that oil refining could be a national business, not until John D. Rockefeller came along. The conventional wisdom at the time was that oil production is where the money was, then transportation. Refining was almost an afterthought, being comprised of extremely small firms with meager output.