Missed opportunities your family had of becoming filthy rich

[lippy]

I was talking to my roommates and each had a story to share and I found them rather interesting.

I have 2;

In the 1950's my grandpa was a very successful OB/GYN in Wichita, KS (before HMOs and such, so people paid a premium for the better service). He was making more money than he could spend and investing all over. One day a couple of brothers were going door to door in his affluent community trying to get investors for their restaurant start-up. My grandpa says he had the check written out but decided not to do it ($20,000 for 20% or something close to that) and instead invested in a business complex that he barely broke even on. The two guys? Frank and Dan Carney. The company? PizzaHut.


My Dad owned 51% of a company making "peripherals" for C64s in the mid-80's. The company was doing upwards of $20m annually in sales and was going to go public in the 4th quarter of a given year. The investors persuaded my Dad from going public as they thought they'd make many more millions by waiting. Well, the Christmas season sucked and C64 basically went under. The company was owed around $3m from distributors that went into bankruptcy. Had his company gone public, they would of had the capital to acquire the distributors at an incredibly reduced cost and achieved some nifty vertical integration. His company ended up failing and they sold off everything to pay off loans.

Yours?

[Vavavoom]

Op : PizzaHut...OUCH !

My family's :

We went on holiday for 2 weeks in 1991...

At the end of the 2nd week..we stayed for a 3rd week...

That 2nd week was the 20th and final week on our football Pools coupon...

The 21st week our numbers which my mum had used for approx 4-5 years came in...

£560K.... which I would say is the equivilant of £1.5M now at the very least !


Vava

[pergesu]

My dad sold off like $8k worth of stock in Microsoft in 1987 I think. Don't know how much that would be worth today. Probably a nice chunk of change though.

[beenben]

my grandmother said something about one of her relatives having a succesful store, but he had invested heavily in the stock market on margin. the 1929 crash = busto.

(my grandfather was going on a trip out of hte country and didn't want to watch the markets so he sold all his stock right before the crash).

my dad c/have had a boring job at a gigasmic law firm and made beaucoup bucks but went to try cases for a government agency instead. lower pay, more job security.

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
My dad sold off like $8k worth of stock in Microsoft in 1987 I think. Don't know how much that would be worth today. Probably a nice chunk of change though.

[/ QUOTE ]
Assume he sold in the middle of the year, for lack of a better idea, and it's gone up 7166% since then. So on $8k that would be $573,280 today If he'd held onto it.

[tedtodd]

My greatgreatgrandfather invented the Staple (not the stapler) and spiral bound notebooks, but both inventions/patents were sold cheaply. And my greatgrandfather built his own car in 1909 as well(may have been steam powered-not sure). It was at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in MA, but is at some auto museum in Palm Beach now.

Taken from a Winchester Historical Society Newsletter about the car owners in the town in 1909:
"...a family member of Winchester inventor
Louis Goddu – inventor of the staple – drove his “own make,” and Ella T. Wallis drove an “electric vehicle.”"

I'm also a direct decendent of inventor Simon Willard (1753-1848), he was famous clockmaker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Willard#The_clocks

There had been fortunes on both sides of my mothers family, but most has been lost. She blames alcoholism, gambling problems, poor business deals, and being very poor venture capitalists as the main culprits. Perhaps I'll be able to learn from their mistakes.

[mattsey9]

My grandmother tried to convince my grandfather to open Dairy Queen franchises in Los Angeles in the mid-1950's. He told her it wouldn't be successful and she eventually dropped the idea.

My mom's family were moonshiners during the time before Prohibition and during it. They got busted, and the Kennedys made billions. Bad luck there...

[SlowHabit]

Shorting the gambling stocks with my bankroll + margin.

[dlk9s]

One of the few times my parents played the lottery when I was a kid (pre-Powerball, Megaball, etc -- just straight up six numbers), they got four of six numbers right. They were off by one on the other two.

I suppose being off by one is no different than being off by twenty, but it still seemed crazy. $11 million.

Additional thought: who knows if I would've become filthy rich, as I don't believe the technology has taken off yet, but I had an idea for a product about 4-5 years ago. I never did anything with it (no idea how, didn't think about it seriously, etc.). Last month, I saw an article about how it is being implemented at my wife's alma mater. D'oh.

[DarthIgnurnt]

My father was approached by a group of ex-work acquaintances in Clearwater, FL in the early 80's to invest in a theme restaurant. He passed. It was Hooters.

I presented a business plan to the SVP of a top-5 US bank in 1996 for a consumer-to-consumer online payment mechanism. He loved it personally, but saw no significant market for it. Some of the examples I used were regarding direct consumer-to-consumer online sales (but ebay wasn't really around yet). He emailed me about 2-3 years later or so to show me a press release for Paypal.

I was employee #10 of a company that went public in 1999. Was in a lockup period when my 80 cent options were trading at $90+/share (early 2000). When the period was over, the shares were at $32. Still some nice FU money, but also suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.