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.”
Number
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.”
Fact
Spotify didn't buy The Ringer for ad revenue, it bought exclusive content to cut churn
Shaan argues Spotify's ~$300M for The Ringer has nothing to do with podcast ad revenue: as an audio (not just music) company it buys exclusive key content like Bill Simmons so listeners switch to and stay on Spotify, the same content-wars logic as HBO and Netflix.
“it's like the HBO model or whatever, Netflix. They're all trying to do the same thing, which is how do we get the key content here so that our subscribers stay subscribers or new people become subscribers? And that's the math. And so it has nothing to do with what The Ringer can do in its own revenue. That's irrelevant to them. It's what they think they can do if they— the key content in the key podcast verticals.”