Book Summary Preview : 1,000 Dollars & an Idea

The Big Idea

“My work is to create companies and build them,” writes Sam Wyly in this candid and engrossing account of the process, relationships, struggles, and strategies in technology, energy, retail, and investments over the last forty-five years that have made him one of the 1,000 wealthiest people in the world.

From the hardships his parents faced trying to hold on to the family cotton farm during the Depression to the coaching he received on the high school football field, this self-made billionaire describes how his early years in Louisiana prepared him for what lay ahead. His sales experience with IBM and Honeywell in Dallas in the early 1960s gave him the idea to start the first “computer utility.” Risking $1,000 of his savings, he founded University Computing in 1963 and took it public two years later, becoming a millionaire at the age of thirty.

Later business successes included taking on the mammoth AT&T monopoly, expanding the small chains of Michaels Stores and Bonanza Steakhouses to over a thousand locations nationwide, co-founding the Maverick Capital and Ranger Capital hedge funds, and founding Green Mountain Energy, the largest provider of cleaner energy in America today.

Why You Need This Book

Part autobiography and part inspirational business guide, “1,000 Dollars and an Idea” is full of refreshing insights and homespun life lessons about what it takes to create, grow, and build successful companies that can challenge the world’s best.

Beat Tallulah

Business is a lot like football.

And although football’s certainly no prerequisite for success such that every entrepreneur should have played football in high school or college or even just in some sandlot league, had Sam not played in high school, his outlook on entrepreneurship would be very different.

Football taught him about setting goals, coping with fear, using leverage, maximizing assets, and understanding weaknesses. It also taught him about losing – you can’t learn how to win.

Setting a goal and then going after it is difficult for some people. You begin by defining what you want. But to decide that, you have to know who you are. If you don’t know who you are, becoming an entrepreneur can be a very expensive (and humbling) way of finding out.

Next, a goal needs to be realistic. Many people yearn for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but have no idea how to find the rainbow in the first place. Or they aren’t willing to put in the time looking for one, or don’t have the courage to walk all the way to the end of it.

Over the years, Sam discovered that whatever someone’s ultimate goal might be, the easiest way to get there is to map out a course with smaller goals along the way. You find one small thing you can do, and you keep on doing it. Little victories add up.

Great teams do not always win, but without a great team – without synergy and oneness – winning becomes that much tougher. Being a lone gunslinger in team sports or in business will only get you so far. In both fields of endeavor, you need a team playing together and, at the same time, a structure that allows for each player on that team to flourish in his own unique way. Each member of the team has to be empowered with the responsibility and authority to do the job that needs to be done.

That’s the game. It’s that way in football. It’s that way in business. It’s that way in life.

 

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