I think once you look outside of established brands, there's a lot of this type of thing that happens. Small business led by some random person with no particular competence, who's somehow found himself as the boss. The money comes from some unclear source, though that doesn't necessarily mean illegal, it's just hard to explain why someone thought to invest in this particular venture.
I did something like this over a summer once. Showed up in the office, which was run by the older brother of a friend, and he had a handful of staff. Phone salesman, secretary. Somehow they thought we'd just sort of do stuff and make money. We came up with all sorts of random schemes, and settled on one where we'd buy computers for certain people, who could pay for it through a government subsidy.
About a week or two after, the company was sold, somehow. I was able to claim I'd done the placement that I needed, and I wasn't in need of any money, so it was fine for me.
But weird as hell.
These days I've also come across things with people/money and no plan. They're a little more specific (help us with crypto!) but they're just not focused like you might expect, and the people are literally thinking that they'll learn whatever they need.
Even one of my early jobs in the fund industry was like this. "We've got a bunch of money, let's invest it... somehow".
It can sound like a total joke, and sometimes it is. Other times you actually get somewhere with it and you can learn a lot.
> These days I've also come across things with people/money and no plan. They're a little more specific (help us with crypto!)
Can confirm. I mentor college grads. They’re always coming to us with sketchy job postings they found for random crypto projects. It’s always a small group of people led by a gregarious CEO who think they “just need a few engineers” to launch a crypto scheme that will make them rich.
I guess it's the same with every new fad. "We'll do something with the Web!" "We'll do something with mobile!" "We'll do something with blockchain!" "We'll do something with AI!" and so on.
Web was absolutely a fad the first time around, and that bubble famously burst in a most spectacular manner. AI has been a fad several times, so much so that the term "AI winter" was already coined decades ago. Mobile is a very successful tech, I give you that, but it too had its false starts, and people who thought they’d be the next Twitter in no time if they "just have an app" were dime a dozen a decade or so ago.
I grew up in a family without a lot of money, in a community where there weren't people with a lot of money (or they hid it well) so I was totally unprepared for this as an adult but it turns out -- there are a surprising number of young adults that are just handed a ridiculous stack of money and just need to figure out something productive to do with it. There are some famous examples of it working out well but I'm sure the average is more like these stories.
The question is how to engineer those kinds of emergent situations where you just wind up with a bunch of $$$ - in a way that you'll be fine with looking back on later.
It's weird. On the one hand it feels like "lateral creativity + honesty = unicorn", like "never the twain shall meet", but on the other hand I can't come up with a good rigorous explanation for why that's the case.
I did something like this over a summer once. Showed up in the office, which was run by the older brother of a friend, and he had a handful of staff. Phone salesman, secretary. Somehow they thought we'd just sort of do stuff and make money. We came up with all sorts of random schemes, and settled on one where we'd buy computers for certain people, who could pay for it through a government subsidy.
About a week or two after, the company was sold, somehow. I was able to claim I'd done the placement that I needed, and I wasn't in need of any money, so it was fine for me.
But weird as hell.
These days I've also come across things with people/money and no plan. They're a little more specific (help us with crypto!) but they're just not focused like you might expect, and the people are literally thinking that they'll learn whatever they need.
Even one of my early jobs in the fund industry was like this. "We've got a bunch of money, let's invest it... somehow".
It can sound like a total joke, and sometimes it is. Other times you actually get somewhere with it and you can learn a lot.