Story
The $40K HBO employee charging $250K per website in 1995
American Express paid Arthur Andersen millions for a website, who subcontracted to a software firm, who hired Altucher because nobody knew how to build websites in 1995. He and his brother-in-law collected $250K to build americanexpress.com while his HBO salary was $40K/year.
“And then suddenly they'd pay me and my brother-in-law, uh, $250,000 to make americanexpress.com. So That was one of our first websites. And I, my salary at HBO at the time was $40,000 a year.”
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Cashed out web agency for $15M in cash at the 1999 peak
Altucher built websites for HBO, American Express, The Matrix and record labels, then sold the agency near the dot-com peak in 1999 and took the proceeds entirely in cash rather than paper that later went to zero.
$15M
Cash proceeds from selling web agency · USD
“Uh, about, uh, $15 million. And then cash. Holy fuck. Yeah. So cash, not, not like, so a lot of people then, you know, went public or sold and they got paper and then they died in the dot-com bust because the paper went to zero, the stocks went to zero. So I had enough sense at like the peak in 1999, I cashed out and I had the cash in my checking account.”