Cold Hard Truth: Learning From Dragons Den’s Kevin O’Leary On Business, Money And Life Part 9

September 30, 2011

The professor abruptly left the meeting, saying he had another appointment to attend.  The Dragons conferred amongst themselves privately for a few minutes and then met again with the 4 students without their professor present this time.  The Dragons tell the students that they had no idea this professor was influencing things to such an extent behind the scenes and that his vision for how the company should grow was very different from theirs.  Even worse, the Dragons were very concerned that the students did not seem to object or even react to the fact that the professor had a very different vision to the company’s direction than the Dragons did, a direction the students had never even mentioned to the Dragons before.  I think this omission is a key indicator of how inexperienced these students were about real world business affairs.

One of the students said of the professor “We have tremendous respect for him, and if it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here, to be even capable to pitch during that first and second audition.”

Amazingly, the Job Lofters decide to side with the professor and no seed money rather than go with the Dragons, remove the professor from the board, and get $200,000 right away.

Fortunately, siding with the professor didn’t doom the company.  Herjavec reported :

“JobLoft managed to grow and enjoy some success after I tore up the cheque, and it was later sold to larger competitor, generating, I exptect, a satifying capital gain for the founders.  The company may have grown faster and bigger with our injection of cash and reservoir of experience, but the event didn’t destroy their dreams.  Not by any means.  Good for them.” – from Driven

The Dragons lost out on a potentially very lucrative dotcom startup (think Monster.com) but the incident had an unexpected effect on the popularity of the Dragons Den show itself.

Filed under: Inspiration

Tags: angel, capital, den, Dragon, investor, shark, startup, tank, venture