constructing.
Some people abandon a life in the snap of a finger, and now Michael essentially wanted to do the same thing by giving up his company, which was his life. It staggers me, given what it took him to create DrinkUp, starting from scratch.
When Michael and I first moved to D.C., we were about as broke as it was possible for two people to be. We had six hundred dollars in cash, a car worth about a third of that on a good day, and a couple of Hefty bags with our clothes and shoes and drugstore toiletries jammed inside.
But within a week, Michael landed a job as a waiter at a pizza place—we both agreed he needed to be fed at work or we’d go bankrupt, fast—and soon after that I capitalized on my babysitting experience and got hired as a nanny for a wealthy family with two-year-old twins. Later I’d learn the twins were biters, but at the time, I felt incredibly fortunate to be earning three hundred dollars a week—which, as it turned out, ended up being about fifty dollars per bite.
We lived in a youth hostel at first, until we’d saved enough money for a security deposit, then we moved into a fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in Tenleytown, where my one luxury was keeping on a kitchen light all night so the cockroaches wouldn’t venture out of the cracks around the stove. We bought a secondhand futon that was our couch during the day and our bed at night, and we trash-picked a little kitchen table and two mismatched chairs that we painted sky blue to add a splash of color to our dreary apartment. Then we took out student loans for college and got even broker. But Michael had a telescopic view into the future; he could see that he needed to get deeper into debt in order to climb more quickly out of it. Somehow, between our jobs and financial aid and loans, we cobbled together enough to attend school—Michael at Georgetown University and I at the University of Maryland in College Park. We worked by day, took classes at night, and spent every weekend alternately napping and studying—at least I napped, while Michael used a yellow highlighter to mark up his textbooks on the futon next to me.
Michael’s grades and test scores were so phenomenal he could’ve gotten a job anywhere. I always thought he’d do something with computers, or maybe rise through the ranks of a Fortune 500 company. But Michael was determined to never work for anyone but himself. He bided his time, whipping through college in three years and applying to business schools while he pored over the blueprints and mission statements of start-up companies.
“There’s always room for a new product,” he’d say, pacing our apartment like a 1950s father outside the hospital delivery room. “The trick is finding the niche. Mrs. Fields cookies. Post-it notes. Baby Einstein videos. None of those took a lot of capital; they all started small and exploded. What’s missing? What does the market not know it needs yet?”
Our apartment was so tiny he could take only three or four steps before stubbing his toe on our futon frame or dark-wood dresser from Goodwill and cursing before he spun around again, and I hid a smile while I watched him. He felt to me like a greyhound, all coiled energy, every speck of his concentration waiting for the gate in front of him to slide open and reveal the racetrack.
The only thing he needed was an idea. None of us knew it at the time, but one was already simmering in his mind. During Michael’s very first semester at Georgetown, his favorite professor, Raj, had used Coke versus Pepsi in a case study about effective advertising strategies.
Much later, Michael would tell me he’d jotted down a question mark in the margin of his notebook as he idly wondered, “Why is it Coke versus Pepsi? Why isn’t there something else?” The thought didn’t take hold then, though. It lingered deep inside Michael’s brain, waiting to be triggered by the perfect collision of circumstances, which wouldn’t occur until
Some people abandon a life in the snap of a finger, and now Michael essentially wanted to do the same thing by giving up his company, which was his life. It staggers me, given what it took him to create DrinkUp, starting from scratch.
When Michael and I first moved to D.C., we were about as broke as it was possible for two people to be. We had six hundred dollars in cash, a car worth about a third of that on a good day, and a couple of Hefty bags with our clothes and shoes and drugstore toiletries jammed inside.
But within a week, Michael landed a job as a waiter at a pizza place—we both agreed he needed to be fed at work or we’d go bankrupt, fast—and soon after that I capitalized on my babysitting experience and got hired as a nanny for a wealthy family with two-year-old twins. Later I’d learn the twins were biters, but at the time, I felt incredibly fortunate to be earning three hundred dollars a week—which, as it turned out, ended up being about fifty dollars per bite.
We lived in a youth hostel at first, until we’d saved enough money for a security deposit, then we moved into a fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in Tenleytown, where my one luxury was keeping on a kitchen light all night so the cockroaches wouldn’t venture out of the cracks around the stove. We bought a secondhand futon that was our couch during the day and our bed at night, and we trash-picked a little kitchen table and two mismatched chairs that we painted sky blue to add a splash of color to our dreary apartment. Then we took out student loans for college and got even broker. But Michael had a telescopic view into the future; he could see that he needed to get deeper into debt in order to climb more quickly out of it. Somehow, between our jobs and financial aid and loans, we cobbled together enough to attend school—Michael at Georgetown University and I at the University of Maryland in College Park. We worked by day, took classes at night, and spent every weekend alternately napping and studying—at least I napped, while Michael used a yellow highlighter to mark up his textbooks on the futon next to me.
Michael’s grades and test scores were so phenomenal he could’ve gotten a job anywhere. I always thought he’d do something with computers, or maybe rise through the ranks of a Fortune 500 company. But Michael was determined to never work for anyone but himself. He bided his time, whipping through college in three years and applying to business schools while he pored over the blueprints and mission statements of start-up companies.
“There’s always room for a new product,” he’d say, pacing our apartment like a 1950s father outside the hospital delivery room. “The trick is finding the niche. Mrs. Fields cookies. Post-it notes. Baby Einstein videos. None of those took a lot of capital; they all started small and exploded. What’s missing? What does the market not know it needs yet?”
Our apartment was so tiny he could take only three or four steps before stubbing his toe on our futon frame or dark-wood dresser from Goodwill and cursing before he spun around again, and I hid a smile while I watched him. He felt to me like a greyhound, all coiled energy, every speck of his concentration waiting for the gate in front of him to slide open and reveal the racetrack.
The only thing he needed was an idea. None of us knew it at the time, but one was already simmering in his mind. During Michael’s very first semester at Georgetown, his favorite professor, Raj, had used Coke versus Pepsi in a case study about effective advertising strategies.
Much later, Michael would tell me he’d jotted down a question mark in the margin of his notebook as he idly wondered, “Why is it Coke versus Pepsi? Why isn’t there something else?” The thought didn’t take hold then, though. It lingered deep inside Michael’s brain, waiting to be triggered by the perfect collision of circumstances, which wouldn’t occur until
Similar Books
