Saturday, January 31, 2015

Return on Collision: The Tony Hsieh Story

Excerpts from “Tony Hsieh Is Building a Startup Paradise in Vegas” by Susan Berfield published December 30, 2014 in Bloomberg Businessweek.

When Hsieh met Ashton Allen, co-founder of Rabbit!, he called it a “serendipitous collision.” That was in 2010, at a conference in Hawaii.

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“We’re maximizing long-term ROC and ROL, return on collisions and return on luck. We’re accelerating serendipity.”

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“We’re starting to understand what opportunities there are that could potentially both generate profitability and also a return on collision,” says Maggie Hsu, who’s focused on business development at the Downtown Project.

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Now there’s a consultant who advises entrepreneurs. His company is called ROCeteer (ROC, as in Return on Collisions).

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Downs says the Downtown Project is considering leasing some unused property to other developers. Hsieh would become a landlord, earning a return on investment if not collision.

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“When we first started, we thought we had to invest a lot in residential, we thought we had to build high-rises or lots of small spaces to get a return on collision,” he tells the executives.

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“Someone like me, I’m out in a collisionable way three or four hours a day, seven days a week. So I’m worth about 1,000 collisionable hours a year.”

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“We did the math on Jake. When he’s here, he’s out about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 12 weeks a year. So he’s worth 1,000 collisionable hours, too.”

Hsieh began to apply this metric to investments that might not make money for a while. “Say we want 100,000 collisionable hours a year from an investment. That works out to 2.3 hours per square foot per year,” he says, with a slight smile.

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“We’re kind of agnostic about what goes into a space. It’s ‘are you going to yield those collisionable hours?’ If not, we can say no without judging the quality of the idea.”

Determining the number of interactions between people and their value had been Jorgensen’s job. He was the collision scientist, until he was dismissed.

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A recent public document from the Downtown Project says: “Goal: 10 million collisionable hours per year inside the llama footprint.” Llamas are Hsieh’s talisman; the 60 acres he owns roughly form the shape of one.

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The former collision scientist is in an Airstream. Hsieh has one, too.