Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did you want to do that? That made no sense to me.

Jason Robbins: I know. I just felt that it was tough out there. Real estate is the long-term play. Now, I’m basically chasing a stock I sold. If I stayed at Goldman Sachs and didn’t bother about getting my MBA and dealt with the fact that I was doing operations work when part of me was saying, “You’ve got to do that high-level stuff that everyone is doing.” I left because I didn’t have a high-level job, and I was being treated by the people above me very poorly. They were being treated poorly by people above them who were younger. You had these young traders making a lot of money treating these mid-level people very rudely. They’re older and more experienced. Then those people would get me to do work for them.

If I stayed at Goldman when it was 5,000 people and not 30, I wouldn’t have to work again. One of the lessons I guess I have for people is stick with things. Stick with it. I’m not saying stick with an idea if it’s not working, but if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re doing a product and the first product doesn’t work, then find something else and stick with it. It’s the enjoyment of developing the product and finding how to fit the key into the hole that is what you enjoy. For me,  I was torn between not really knowing what I enjoy, being told I could be anything I wanted, being fairly smart, and then the reality of effort and time. What I realized in the real estate job where I was driving 45 minutes to New Jersey is that the most accessible people in this brokerage firm were high school graduates and some college graduates. Their big thing was that they had already put 10 to 12 years of effort behind them.

Sramana Mitra: It takes a lot of time to master anything and they’ve put in time to master that thing.

Jason Robbins: Right. Here I am with an MBA that’s going to be virtually useless to try to make money while I compete against people who have put in the time. It would take a long time before I got that. Again, I gave up. I went to another job. I left Goldman and went to business school. For the next four years or so, I was doing lots of different things. After real estate, I wound up getting into computer consulting. I was able to make $125 an hour in 1994. I could work for one day a week and make more money than I was making anywhere.

Then a friend of mine was doing a digital imaging Internet business. He took the early digital camera and used it to allow companies to photograph their own product lines. Then they would have a catalog that they can print out on a very expensive color printer. We gave the businesses a tool to print their own merchandise. I worked with him for a while. I wanted ownership in the business. After I got out of business school, I was going to do that with them. I didn’t and then four years later, I wanted to join them. Obviously, there’s no equity for me then, because they were four years into it.

I realized that getting back to the Internet is not too late. My brother-in-law was in the promotional products business, which is what I’m in today. He was a supplier. Our business sells t-shirts, mugs and mouse pads. Our business is separated into people who are distributor sales people. They would buy from catalogs or meet the vendors who would show them the merchandise. Those vendors are called suppliers. My brother-in-law was a supplier. He said, “Why don’t you come and join me. We’ll be partners. You’ll bring your business acumen, and I’ll bring the experience I already have in this business.”

After about a year of working together, we didn’t get along very well. He wanted us to run the machine until we can buy the next machine. As a Finance guy, I wanted to lease the machine, save the money, pay a guy to do it so we could grow faster. Either way, it wasn’t working out for us. I left and I was really sad and depressed because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was engaged at that time. It was a slightly depressing time. I looked back, “I have all these years behind me. I’m all over the place. If I had stayed at Goldman, I’d have made a ton of money.”

This segment is part 3 in the series : Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos
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