First Excerpt

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This post will be the first of a number of excerpts from my book. Over the next month I'll post as many as I can. This first one is from a chapter I wrote on Bill Gross, who has founded many search companies (his latest is Snap), but Overture (nee GoTo nee Yahoo Search Marketing) was his biggest hit. I think Bill makes for one of the best stories in the book, and I hope I did him justice. This is a small portion of the chapter, titled "A Billion Dollars, One Nickel at a Time." Each chapter in the book is broken into sections, this excerpt starts with a section, about a third of the way through the chapter, which focuses on Gross's early insights into market economics. As with all things book related, I look forward to your feedback and clarifications/corrections. The Sugar Daddy: It’s All About Arbitrage When he was twelve, Gross lived in an apartment building in Encino, California, outside of Los Angeles. There were hundreds of kids in that complex, Gross recalls. “We all roller-skated together, played baseball together, swam together, did everything together,” he tells me. And when they had saved up enough money, they all made the pilgrimage to a local pharmacy, where they’d buy their fix of candy. “We used to hop the cinder-block wall surrounding the complex and go buy candy for a dime at the West Valley Medical Center,” he recalls. “We’d go there all the time.” Now here’s where it gets interesting. In Gross’s words: “One day I was at Savon [pronounced Save-on] on Ventura Boulevard and saw they had a special on candy, three for a quarter. So I bought five dol- lars worth—at eight and a third cents each—and brought them back to my apartment, where...

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