How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life Read Online Free PDF

variables in my investments.
    Professional Investors: After my Webvan disaster I figured I might need some professional investing help.
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royalties were pouring in and I didn’t have the time to do my own research. Nor did I trust my financial skills, and for good reason.
    My bank, Wells Fargo, pitched me on its investment services, and I decided to trust it with half of my investible funds. Trust is probably the wrong term because I only let Wells Fargo have half; I half trusted it. I did my own investing with the other half of my money. The experts at Wells Fargo helpfully invested my money in Enron, WorldCom, and some other names that have become synonymous with losing money. Clearly my investment professionals did not have access to better information than I had. I withdrew my money from their management and have done my own thing since then, mostly in broad-market, unmanaged funds. (That has worked out better.)
    Folderoo: In the early days of
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when floppy disks were still in widespread use, it was common to hand a coworker a document along with a floppy disk in case the coworker needed to make changes. The problem was that there was no elegant way to attach a floppy disk to a piece of paper. My brilliant idea was to invent a manila folder with a kangaroo-type pocket on the front to hold the disk. It wouldn’t cost much more than a regular folder to produce, and it would be twice as useful. I figured the product could have a
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tie-in because Dilbert has a shirt pocket much like I was putting on the folder. I made a prototype (which took five minutes) and pitched it to my syndicate, United Media, which I hoped could find a licensee who would produce and market the product while we collected royalties for the
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association. This idea went nowhere because United Media was in the licensing business, not the product-design business, and this idea was out of its strikezone. I assume the name Folderoo is owned by someone else at this point. Eventually some folder companies made and sold folders with pockets for disks. I don’t know how well they did.
    Calendar Patent: I had an idea for embedding ads in electronic calendars in a clever way that people would find useful. The idea was for a program to read your calendar entries and match your plans with vendor offers that made sense for the activities predicted by the calendar. For example, if you planned to go car shopping for a minivan next month, you would just put that entry on your calendar and vendors would populate the entry with local deals and offers. You would see the offers only if you clicked on them. The ads would be managed through a third party (in the “cloud,” as we might say today), so vendors would never directly see any user’s calendar information. The patent was rejected because a patent that was totally unrelated—meaning it had nothing to do with calendars at all—allegedly included the process I described. My reading of the existing patent was that it had nothing to do with my idea, but I consulted with my patent attorney and let it drop. Interestingly, the owner of the existing patent probably doesn’t know he’s sitting on a gold mine.
    Keypad Patent: I filed a patent on an idea for text entry on a ten-key keypad. This was in the pre–smart phone era, when people texted on their regular ten-key phones, tapping a key however many times it took to designate the character they intended. My idea involved mentally projecting a letter on the keypad and creating a two-key shortcut for each letter that was based on its shape characteristics. The patent was granted, but the evolution of phone technology quickly made it obsolete.
    Dilberito: During the busiest years of
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’s climb into popular culture, I was often too busy to eat well. I also wanted to give back, as the saying goes, to a world that was being more generous than I thought my meager talent deserved. I came up with the idea of creating a food product that was