Sunday, August 10, 2014

What’s It Like to Lose $100 Million at Facebook

By James Altucher

Noah Kagan was fired as one of the first employees of Facebook and he left probably $100,000,000 behind if he had stayed. Then he was fired early on as an employee of Mint.com, which later got bought by Intuit.

SO I decided to call him.

I rarely leave my house so sometimes my only interactions are when I call strangers.

“It did feel horrible,” he told me, “But I was arrogant. I deserved to be fired.”

He told me more about what happened. Why he was fired. What he did afterwards. What he’s doing now is genius. It made me feel bad again because I wish I had thought about. His company AppSumo is like a groupon for digital products.

He finds a digital product (an app, even a list of copywriting tips, a newsletter, whatever), negotiates a discount for a certain time period, and then sells it online to his 750,000 subscribers.

He describes all of this on my podcast.

But the podcast veered in a different direction THAT MAYBE CHANGED MY LIFE. We started talking about how to get out of the comfort zone.

“Go to a coffee shop and ask for 10% off,” he gave me the challenge. “Order some stuff, it’ll come to around $5, and then just say ‘I would like 10% off please’ .”

“Any coffee shop? I can’t imagine a Starbucks would allow me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they have rules.”

“Go to a Starbucks.”

Right away I was thinking of all sorts of excuses. It should’ve been so easy to Ask but I couldn’t.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

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