I have been an entrepreneur for as long as anyone close to me can remember. While most eight year olds were learning how to properly squeeze a lemon, I was managing seven lemonade stands across my neighborhood in Edison NJ. When I turned twelve, I set my sights on my local mall, where I became something of a legend selling baseball cards on weekends. In high school I joined the family business, a liquor store called Shoppers Discount Liquors that my dad started. It wasn’t long before I became obsessed with collecting wine.
In 1997, I began to recognize the importance of e-commerce; shortly thereafter, WineLibrary.com was born. I used the site to grow the store from a $3 million business to a $45 million business, and it was just the beginning. Armed with a Flipcam and a NY Jets bucket, I started Wine Library TV in 2006 to share my knowledge and passion for wine with a community that desperately needed a fresh voice. It wasn’t long before… Read more
I was having dinner the other day with a buddy of mine and I was talking about how Rafael Nadal is underrated. He started laughing and said, “how can Raphael Nadal be underrated? He’s so rated!”
So I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about why I’m not angel investing as much lately, and I think there’s a conversation there that I’d like to talk about and bring into our space. And the title of that is:
I can’t code, and you can’t sell crap.
People often ask me how I stay on top of tech. It’s literally one of the top three or four questions I get at Q&As when I give talks. It’s always like “well, how do you stay on top of it? There’s so much going on!”