BEFORE EBAY
I started my business career at age eleven. Years before the internet was around, I became interested in the weapons’ trade and began to order catalogues from the leading corporations in the defense industry. Every day, I sent out about ten to twenty letters asking for new information material, and soon, tons of shiny and luxurious brochures were sent to me from all over the world. After a year, about two thousand catalogues advertising everything from machine guns to fighter jets and ground missiles to air missiles stapled in my room. After having received the catalogues I usually asked for a price list, an offer for helicopters or jets and got the corresponding material very swiftly. My friends visited me often to take a look at the latest defense technology and to browse through offers for new and used machinery. Solely my mother was not too amused about my fanciful hobby and suggested I should talk to the school psychologist about it...
Later, when I turned twelve, I got my first computer, a Commodore VC20. I immediately started to program, was soon able to earn ten times my pocket money, and became a nerd-star at school. But business still interested me more than programming, and even in my early childhood, I used to ask questions like "How many Lego bricks are there worldwide?", "How many people are sitting on the toilet right now?" Later, the issues became more personal: "How many girls are thinking of me this very second?" and again commercial: "How many liters of coke were sold today, what was the turnover, and what will be the profit?" Right now I’m actually wondering: "How many people will buy this book?"…
At the age of seventeen, I started my first corporation, the Guttmann & Marcovici Ltd., together with my long-term business partner Davies Guttmann. Since the age at which one can start a business is 18, I had to get the court’s permission first in order to legally incorporate. My father, his three brothers, my mother, and my grandparents on either side- they all had had or were still running their own businesses, like virtually everybody else around me did. When I was young, I did not know that one could also have a regular job, be an employee of the state or a private company; the reality of pay checks, received each month for a particular amount of hours spent working for someone else, simply did not exist in my mind set. For all I knew, there were only two options: to study and then run one’s own business, or to skip the study part and start business right away.
AUSTRIA INVESTMENT LETTER
My first company was a publishing company. Davies Guttmann and I founded the Austria Investment Letter, a classical investment advising publication concentrating on the Austrian and European stock exchanges. We started it in 1988, right after the stock-crash of 1987. The Vienna Stock Exchange then was in a bull market, so nothing could have possibly gone wrong. Every stock we suggested to buy rallied, and so our product became very successful. In the beginning we produced whole editions on a copy machine, but after one year in the business, we already had more than two thousand subscribers, each of them paying 160 euros a year, which allowed us to bring in a great turnover as we had no employees and only a tiny, 20sqms office. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Vienna Stock market rallied because Austria was regarded to be the ideal country for conducting business between East and West, already having lots of contacts and connections to the now former Eastern Block. In 1990, we topped at about five thousand subscribers, and to give our product an even more exclusive appearance, we raised the subscription fee to 250 euros a year and limited the stock letter with five thousand subscriptions since our recommendations had already begun to influence the market strongly. In fact, our power over the market had grown to such an extend that investors often felt tempted to bribe our printing company or employees of the Austrian postal services to get an edition earlier than the average subscriber would receive it. The investor could then buy stocks we recommended on Fridays, before the letter would be delivered to the subscribers on Mondays. To get this problem under control, we had to hire security men to guard the printing machines and keep watch over the transport to the post office.
In 1990, we published two new stock letters: the Eco-Invest, a publication exclusively propagating ecological investments that was and still is very successful today, and the European Investors’ Herald for European Stock, delivering information to the more affluent audience and institutional investors, especially in the Middle East and the United States. The latter was delivered by DHL courier services weekly and cost over 1000 euros a year. Later, we started yet another publication on options and futures. We also organized seminars and workshops on technical analysis, futures trading, stock trading and other relating topics. In 1990, we opened a shop for investment literature and software in downtown Vienna. The venture became a total disaster, mainly for one reason: even in Austria, most people in the banking and investment business are quite busy during the day, and so, the shop was not filled with the clientele we had wished for but frequented predominantly by housewives and unemployed people, habitually scrawling through the city. Thus, the shop was not a success really, and selling one book was often the result of an hour-long, fatiguing consultation with the prospective buyer. It was just then that I swore to myself never ever to engage in a retail business, but unfortunately, I soon forgot that vow I so intelligently had taken.
With the invasion of Kuwait, the situation on the stock market changed dramatically. The bull market in Vienna was over; many of the private investors that were our subscribers and speculators at that time were buying stocks and even options on credit; banks easily loaned up to 70%, and sometimes even more to investors in order to leverage their investments. That way, a 10% decline in the market sometimes meant a total loss. This was, in fact, exactly what happened to myself: Because I was regarded a top specialist, I was granted a portfolio with leverage of 10, and after a short market decline, all the money I had made during the past three years of investing was gone in two days. Of course I was not the only one making great losses, and from early August 1990 till the end of the same year, we lost 50% of our subscribers. I didn’t want to hang on to that business anymore, and so I decided to sell the company. After yet another year in the business, we were able to sell all the publications and even the shop, which, by the way, all still exist and prosper today.
RECREATION
In early 1992, I was finally free from all obligations and decided to relax for a while. I remember skipping through some magazine’s pages in a traveling books shop together with a friend to see where to spend the holidays when I realized that, close to Vienna, some of the nicest and most remote areas could be found, and that Austria truly offered some gorgeous places for hiking and climbing. I couldn’t believe that, at the age of twenty-three, I had never been to the mountains in Austria, leaving aside the few skiing excursions I had undertaken during school time. We immeditely bought a hiking guide and headed for the famous Schneeberg, a 2200mtrs high mountain, approximately an hour away from Vienna. We started our ascent at three o’clock in the afternoon without any equipment or even water and almost killed ourselves on several occasions, especially descending at night without flashlights, but we eventually made it back to the car safe by midnight.
I wasn’t familiar with mountains, hiking, or climbing- these were all activities my parents never had had any interest in. My father, a business man from Romania, was a passionate poker player. He used to take me along to the coffee house where he had his poker sessions; there I would meet my friends, whose parents were avid poker players as well. My mother, on the other hand, loved culture and literature. She took me to theaters and the opera and would buy me any book I wanted.
After that first hike, I was hooked on hiking and climbing, and for the next three years that was the only thing I did. I hiked and climbed all over Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, Morocco, USA and Canada, and was constantly traveling back and forth between diverse renown hiking and climbing places all over the world and Vienna.
I spent some months in Las Vegas gambling at night and climbing during the day; one day I met two guys from California, and we decided to climb a great wall in Red Rocks, CA together, that was 400mtrs high (great place btw). The two seemed quite amenable and very experienced; they would climb together as usual, with me following as a third climber. After approximately three out of thirteen rope lengths, one of the guys started to talk strange stuff; he fantasized about water coming down the wall and told me he knew a secret, that the wall wasn’t steep but flat, and things thelike. To make it short: these guys’ hobby was climbing on acid or LSD. Usually a walk in the woods on LSD is already kind of an adventure, but relying on these two hallucinating lunatics on a vertical wall, 400mtrs tall, was nothing but a freaking nightmare. I survived, but decided afterwards to specialize in solo climbing and hiking, a policy I have largely kept ever since. Approximately a year later, I had to undergo surgery for an umbilical hernia that I had contracted from a laugh attack (you can laugh about this, but at your own risk…) and my climbing carrier came to a sudden end. In hospital, I was still planning for an ascent of the Mount Everest, but the money left from selling the companies was all but gone, and so I had to start a new business.
CONSTRUCTION BUSINESS
From my earliest days on I loved to tinker, I made die cast scale models, built sculptures, electronic devices and RC-Models, and now, after having moved back to Vienna, I was planning to settle down for a while and therefore needed to find an apartment. I discovered one beautifully situated in the center of the city, very spacious, but it was completely run down and needed to be renovated. I decided to do the work myself. Soon people started to ask me whether I would renovate their apartments, offices and houses too, and so began the time of my construction career. The business was booming, soon I had more than fifty workers and up to ten projects at a time. It was great fun to see that one’s work really makes a change; construction truly is a special kind of business- each time you create or remodel a place it is a little bit like building a monument. But constant problems with payments from clients made me loose all joy in the construction business; within a few months I closed all construction places and pulled out of the business.
