Man Becomes 'Accidental Millionaire' After Jet.com's Sale To Walmart (fortune.com) 43
The acquisition of Jet.com by Walmart for $3 billion in cash appears to have made the founder of IdeaDash an "accidental millionaire." Fortune reports: "Martin, who is the founder of a startup called IdeaDash, won Jet.com's nationwide marketing competition -- Jet Insider -- in early 2015. The contest offered a reward of 100,000 shares of Jet stock to the contestant who got the most people to sign up for 6-month free trial 'insider' memberships to the membership shopping site, a sort of online Costco or Sam's Club. According to his company's website, Martin took first place out of the 350,000 people who participated, getting over 8,000 people to sign up. Martin spent $18,000 on online ads, Bloomberg reports, and now has a stake in Jet that is reportedly worth millions. Although Martin told Bloomberg that he is not sure exactly what his stake is worth, Fusion reported in February 2015 that his piece could be valued between $10 million and $20 million."
More like (Score:5, Insightful)
Man with a plan finally sees the fruits of his efforts after several years
Will wallmart use some fine print to get out payin (Score:2)
Will walmart use some fine print to get out of paying this out?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The fruit of his effort was winning the contest and receiving 100.000 shares (which was already worth quite some money).
Having the prize suddenly jump up in value is a lucky bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
You, sir or madam, have a very bleak outlook on life.
Re: (Score:2)
You, sir or madam, have a very bleak outlook on life.
How does any one person get thousands of people to sign up without resorting to spamming and / or throwing ethics out the window?
Re: (Score:3)
You apparently don't read. THE SUMMARY says that he bought online ads.
Re: (Score:2)
You apparently don't read. THE SUMMARY says that he bought online ads.
I did read the summary; I know that he spent $18k on advertising, but I still fail to fathom how he could have got thousands of people to legitimately sign up for the trial without resorting to spamming (eg. buying email addresses) or other unethical practices.
Accidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Accidental? (Score:5, Funny)
Well frankly, I'm a bit pissed.
Re:Accidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the other guy who spent $19k and didn't win shit?
Put the pipe down, AC. It wasn't $18,000 worth of lottery tickets, the winner was chosen based on performance (amount of referrals).. $18,000 was the cost of implementing his strategy. Which happened to be the best one. If someone else spent $19,000 on a less successful strategy, well that's the way the cookie crumbles.
You can call the boosted post-acquisition Jet.com stock value a windfall, but I find no reasonable way of calling it an "accident".
Re: (Score:2)
Well considering the strategy was to essentially pay 2.25$ to get each person to sign up for a free account... Not sure how great that strategy is... Then again I have no idea, perhaps that is good value for your money. I guess the key to that metric is did those 8,000 accounts generate more than 18,000$ in profit for Jet?
Re: (Score:2)
What about the other guy who spent $19k and didn't win shit?
The same as any business which spends money to acquire a customer and fails, or builds a product which doesn't sell, or any number of ventures which require capital expenditures without a guarantee of return. Not everything which requires spending money for uncertain return is gambling.
Re: (Score:1)
What I'm curious about is what do people think Amazon did right that Walmart has not yet done? First? Price? Open Market, where they let the demand grow and then undercut? Prime? Infrastructure?
"Not being called Walmart" probably doesn't hurt. Fair or not, the Walmart brand has a permanent stink attached to it. A history of treating employees poorly, working them just short of enough hours to qualify for health insurance and offloading that cost to taxpayers, pricing strategies that have put suppliers out of business and sent jobs overseas, selling "special model number" items that are made of lower quality materials, it goes on and on. Walmart isn't a brand I associate with positive things, and n
encoding (Score:3)
It's 2016, yet...
[...] Jet.comâ(TM)s [...] Samâ(TM)s Club. [...] companyâ(TM)s website[...]
...still happens.
- shame... shame... shame... bling bling bling
Re: (Score:2)
UTF-8! UTF-8! It's so fucking GREAT! UTF-8!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
What exactly did you fix? Seems like you've just hidden the symptoms.
Re: (Score:1)
That's actually pretty awesome. (Score:2)
Yeah, it's a bit like playing the lottery. But it's one of those "I did this dumb thing and got rich anyhow" type stories I love.
If he'd only stuck with pudding ... (Score:2)
VCs didn't get rich sharing money (Score:1)
They don't get rich by sharing their returns with non-investors.
He likely has either been diluted or owns a class of shares which will be diluted.
They didn't give out those shares because they actually wanted to make someone rich, but as a promotional effort. Once the promotion was accomplished they immediately had plenty of reason to begin cutting the guy out of the deal.
It's weird that the original (fusion) article switches between saying they are options and they are shares.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure why multiple classes of shares are even legal.
Dividends, a share of profit (just like Walmart) (Score:4, Informative)
He owns the same thing Walmart owns, though a smaller amount. Walmart thinks their portion is worth over $3 billion, so no the shares probably aren't worthless.
If the company is a) making money and b) not re-investing all of the profit go growth, they'll pay out the extra profit to shareholders as dividends. He'll get his portion of the dividends (profit).
If the company is growing quickly, and therefore reinvesting all profit, his holding increases in value as the company gets bigger, because eventually when it stops growing fast it'll be a bigger company paying bigger dividends.
If someone else wants those future dividends, they can get them by buying the stock from him today, in a private sale. Just because the stock isn't publicly traded doesn't mean it can't be privately traded.
The benefits of being publicly traded would just be that he wouldn't need to take the time to find a buyer, and he could more easily see how much the stock is selling for on any given day.