Lessons Learned From a Failed Ivy League Entrepreneur

A "Case Story" By Chris Cononico
 

Chapter Twenty-Four

With graduation come and gone, my partners and I hadn’t yet decided where to locate the “headquarters” of our new business. Since we hired a manager to replace us at QuakerCard, we didn’t feel the need to remain in Philadelphia. We were free to move wherever we wanted in the country and focus on our expansion plans.

Unfortunately, the leases on our apartments ended before we had anywhere else to go. That left George and I sleeping on the floor of our office every night or in the study halls of random campus buildings. We showered at the gym and kept our belongings at the houses of friends who were still students. Mark was fortunate because his girlfriend, who had graduated from Penn the year prior, was a nurse at Penn’s hospital and Mark lived with her.

In a weird way, there was a side of me that liked the hardship. If I was going to be really rich at a young age, I wanted to earn it. I wanted to pay my dues and go through a proper rite of passage as an entrepreneur. Sleeping on the floor was just going to be part of the story I would tell guests on my yacht some day. It made good fodder for the lectures I would give at Wharton after they begged me to come back as a guest speaker. Unfortunately, I was suffering from severe delusions of grandeur.

In retrospect, these delusions were the first symptoms of trouble. I was losing touch with reality and I wasn’t the only one, either. While my partners didn’t relish hardship as much as I did, they too had delusions of our triumphant success. It went well beyond mere positive thinking. We talked about it like it was our manifest destiny. All of the time we spent in our offices together had isolated us from the rest of the world. We were a case study in “group think,” the phenomenon whereby everyone conforms to the consensus of the group and no one challenges the popular opinion. We were in this together, and we were past the point of three individual perspectives. We had converged into one frame of mind – do whatever it takes to grow the business.

I also proceeded to lose all sense of balance in my life and I lived and breathed our company with my partners. In many ways they had become like brothers. They were the ones with whom I had the most in common. After all, it took too much effort to explain my life to other people who weren’t involved in the business. I didn’t watch TV; I didn’t go out and drink beer anymore; I didn’t really do much other than work. Therefore, I had also lost the art of small talk.

One night at the office, my best friend from high school called me. We talked about my company for a while, but when we switched topics I had problems finding things to say. He had all sorts of funny personal experiences to recount, and I had very little with which to counter. I felt as if I had lost my personality.

Old habits stay with you and a favorite activity for George, Mark, and me was to sit in front of our computers at night and modify the scenarios of our financial models. We would sit there at 4 A.M., drinking sodas from Wawa and eating pretzels, as George would turn to us and say, “Let’s see what happens if we get 3% of the schools, and average spending per student increased by 10%!” Mark and I would nod our heads repeatedly, while digging our hands into the pretzel bag. Invariably, George’s answer would sound something like “CHA-CHING! YOU ARE A RICH MAN, PAL! U2 IS GOING TO BE PLAYING AT YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY!”

Mark and I would both laugh. It was that old joke that gets you every time, no matter how many times you’ve already heard it. However, we were tweaking those models so much that we started to believe some of the scenarios. I mean, we didn’t put any stock in the best-case scenario, but the numbers in our base case started to look real to us. It became as if we were already rich, except we didn’t have access to the money yet.

In many ways, I used the belief that I would become wealthy as justification for my behavior. I expected everything to work out in the end and that’s how I rationalized living such an unbalanced lifestyle. I reckoned my company needed to get “established” and then I would slow things down and enjoy myself. Meanwhile, I was making myself miserable by working around the clock, brooding over potential problems, and obsessing over outcomes beyond my control. It was as if I had forgotten how to relax.

For some reason, I felt guilty about spending time away from my office. I always felt the need to be “productive” for the business. Unfortunately, clearing my head would have been more “productive” for my company than working 7 days a week. However, being at the office gave me the illusion of control and momentum. It made me feel like I was doing everything possible to help my cause.

My relationship with my girlfriend was also suffering. I had no money and couldn’t even take her out on a date. We had been going out for three years, but she came second to my company and I expected her to understand. I didn’t dress any better than I did in college, I didn’t have my own apartment, and I was sleeping on the floor of my office. Despite my talk of future success, I had nothing tangible to show for my efforts.

I must have sounded ridiculous, like a raving lunatic. To make matters worse for her, I stopped exercising and wasn’t in-shape any more. Because I showered at the gym, I stopped shaving unless I had a business meeting. So, from her perspective, I took time to look good for the company, but never for her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was secretly hoping for my company to fail.

My parents were also concerned about me. Whenever I saw them, I always looked like hell. I was sleep-deprived, grumpy, and generally unkempt. All I wanted to talk about was whatever was going on with my business, and I had little patience for criticism. I have no doubt that at this point in my life, the only people I connected with where George and Mark.

The three of us suffered from the same sickness. It was contagious and we infected each other. Our group dynamic had changed after spending so much time cooped-up together in our office. Our interactions had lost some of their professionalism and they weren’t always pleasant. I guess that’s what happens when you work together 24/7 under a lot of pressure.

Different sides of our personalities emerged. George was hotheaded and prone to fits of anger. He would yell and scream in arguments. At times, he could be impossible to work with. Books would fly across the room in the heat of battle. The strange thing was that after the hollering, he had no problem forgetting about it an hour later, whereas Mark and I carried grudges for days. George almost never held grudges. This was how he was used to communicating with us.

Mark was perpetually grumpy and bitingly sarcastic. We nicknamed him “Mr. Salty,” because he could be such a jerk sometimes for no reason. He had the ability to push your buttons for his own pleasure. The unique thing about Mark was that he didn’t stop. Once he found your button, he kept pushing it until one day it didn’t work anymore. The more you got mad at him, the more he pushed it and the funnier it was for him.

I’m not sure what they would say about me. I think I learned to adapt to whomever I was arguing with at the time. If it were George, I would scream back at him at the top of my lungs. If it were Mark, I would say really mean things and try to get under his skin. The point is that we ceased having conventional professional relationships with each other. We spent so much time together that we were like three brothers sharing bunk beds in the same room. We were a dysfunctional family.

On the one hand, the three of us also knew how to motivate each other. Sometimes, it felt like we were doing battle with the rest of the world. Mark used to joke around about the list he was making of people who wouldn’t help us, so we could call them up and tell them to go screw themselves after we were successful. Since it became “us versus them,” we never blamed each other when we missed an RFP, or if a school didn’t want to work with us. All of that energy got channeled into proving other people wrong.

When things were bad, the three of us made each other laugh, and pretty soon we felt better. When it came down to it, we were a team. With all our flaws, we were loyal to the vision of the business we shared together. That stubborn loyalty through tough times was a double-edged sword. When one of us got excited about something, it became contagious to the group and we lost all checks and balances.
 

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
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