An American Start-Up

Tweet

By opening up about their loneliness and isolation, the founders have garnered tangible benefits from their many admirers.

So what are they doing, exactly? That's a question Lusk and Harrison have very openly struggled to address. Often. "We're motivated, passionate, excited, terrified, and at many times have absolutely no idea what we are doing," the two men have written. "Every hour of the day is filled with constant mood swings and the question of 'What the hell are we doing?"

Their struggle to come to terms with the route they've chosen is natural, especially considering that Lusk and Harrison were the only ones among the 792 graduates of Wharton's class of 1999 to start a consumer-products company. Once the partners graduated, they launched the kind of business that their peers wouldn't even have thought of joining. After all, it wasn't as if Platinum had the potential to be the next Yahoo or Amazon; it was a modest venture that seemed tailor-made for QVC. "We have no income and no venture-capital funding," revealed Lusk, the main author of the newsletter, in his first outing as a start-up scribe. "Our inventory is being financed by [credit-card] companies with names like Chase, Citibank, First USA, and Capital One. Our office consists of a refrigerator, oven, sink, two desks, a bay window, and one very large Texas flag. The only thing that makes our seven-second commute to work interesting is avoiding the inventory of computer mice stacked in our living room."

Through the Insider, folks securely tucked away in plush offices at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers eagerly follow Platinum's development. "I have married friends who live the single life vicariously through me," says Lusk, "and now I also have friends at big companies who live the start-up life vicariously through me." Jose Bayardo, a longtime friend of Lusk's who is an investment banker at Chase H&Q in San Francisco, is fascinated by "what they tried and how they tried it," he says. "They've had the typical entrepreneurial process of knocking down doors and bouncing around. I always liked it when they had an inventory count of how many mice they had in their apartment. They usually included some snide comment about how they were overwhelmed with mice."

Indeed, the newsletter's self-effacing tone explains one advantage that the MouseDriver guys have over their well-appointed peers: they're actually having fun. "I love that they're willing to laugh at themselves and their own stupidity," says Kumar, who has even sent the Insider to Cornell's academic student clubs. One of his favorite passages appeared in the newsletter last August: "John is thinking of dying his hair Platinum blond! We're not talking about the casual highlight here...we're talking jet white."

The newsletter went on to rationalize the change by saying that Lusk was contemplating the dye job "to continue to bring much-needed awareness to the company." But then Insider readers learned the real reason for Lusk's flight of follicle fancy. "It's absolutely amazing the things you'll do to 'change your environment' when your creativity and motivation are stifled in such a lackluster setting," Lusk wrote.

Kumar sees educational value in what might look to others like a cheap, attention-getting stunt. "Something like that teaches my students the importance of creativity," he explains. "And a big part of new-product innovation and new-product marketing is creativity -- doing anything that works." As it turned out, Harrison eventually went platinum, whereas Lusk settled for blond highlights. It seems that their hair coloring, like their company, is an ever changing project.

The newsletter's quirky charm is undeniable, but to understand the essence of the Insider's appeal, it's important to know this: even other entrepreneurs seem to delight in the simple pleasure of the MouseDriver Insider.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3  NEXT 

Read more:

Mike Hofman

Mike Hofman was previously editor of Inc.com and a deputy editor at Inc. magazine, which he joined in 1996. The site was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in 2010, and was named the best business website by Folio Magazine. In 2006, Hofman was part of a team of writers nominated for a Webby Award for best business blog. He lives in New York City.

Sign-up for our Technology Newsletter

Email Address: