Bill Nguyen (founder of Color): The Boy In The Bubble  

The first time Nguyen ever pitched a venture capitalist it was for a product he had never heard of. It was 1998, Nguyen was 27, and an entrepreneur had overheard him at a tech conference. “Three weeks later, he calls me and says, I have a meeting tomorrow with Kleiner Perkins, do you want to pitch? Im like, Well, whats the idea? Were going to send faxes over the Internet. Im like, Okay, I can pitch that,” recalls Nguyen. “I never prepared a business model, nothing, literally just pitched the idea this guy told me in the parking lot.” That night Nguyen went home, changed the name of the company from Ziptel to OneBox, expanded the company’s business to web-based “unified messaging,” went to another VC for backing, and, 18 months later, sold the startup for $850 million–two months before the dotcom crash.

This is an excerpt from the fantastic article (expose?) by Danielle Sacks in Fast Company about the crazy mind of Bill Nguyen, a man who won big during the first bubble and who is now, apparently, actively creating the second one. There are so many gems in the linked words–for example, Nguyen happily makes the same mistakes “again and again,” and “never uses” his competitors products because there is “literally nothing to learn.” I think there is a lot to learn by reading the linked article, though.

I kind of want to meet Nguyen face to face, because I don’t believe someone like him could actually exist, much less run a company that has received $41 million in funding from top tier investors. Then again, it’s the crazy ones…