Execution Matters, Ideas Don't

Back in 1999 my friend Phil told me about his brother in law's idea to start a retail business providing eBay listing services.

The idea was simple, if you wanted to sell something on eBay, you'd drop it off at the store and they'd take care of the rest. The store would take a fee for providing the service and you'd get the stuff sold with no hassle.

It sounded like a good idea, but i didn't have a lot of time on my hands for a new investment and showed it to my friends Ron and Jordan. They made a seed investment. The name of the company was EZSale (i found this out from a comment to this post). The story doesn't end happily. The management team didn't execute as well as they could have, the company ran out of money, and the investors pulled the plug on the deal. I am not close enough to supply any details, but that's the gist of it.

So it was with some amazemant that I read Brad's post about AuctionDrop today. Same exact idea. Better execution. Big winner.

That's the venture business. It's happened to me too.

Comments

[John Franks]

MyEZsale was the company. Gen Catalyst and Jafco also investors.

[chervokas]

It's not that ideas don't matter, it's that execution is the difference maker.

[Ron]

Interesting comments. I am the Ron mentioned in Fred's comments above who provided the original capital for this concept. The reality of EZSale was that we did not run out of money. We did pull the plug and wind up the company and distribute remaining cash and assets to all investors only after exhausting every avenue to drive traffic and transactions into the stores. BTW, we had thousands of stores set up, trained and theoretically motivated with the service enabled. It could have been timing, awareness on the part of consumers or the fact that they simply aren't going to bring their stuff into these stores. The results speak for themselves as the business didn't work, but in retrospect i would not think that it was poor management as we figured that out fairly well and I also think that we tried a lot of different approaches and models to drive traffic. Time will tell. I will be watching the current entrants into this space with interest to see if the transaction volumes that they can generate can pay the way and make it a real business.

[Chris Hassett]

Execution is everything.

Timing is everything.

Team is everything.

Technology/business model with sustainable competitive advantage is everything.

Everything is everything. You're only as strong as your weakest link. There are innumerable ways to fail, only a few to succeed, because failure of any one link is failure of the whole.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, first line of Anna Karenina

[John Franks]

Fred, you know the parties involved, do you think despite their one-time common LP they really talked (either before or after)? Answer implied in question!