The secret to business success is in the garage
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 - Updated: 01:10 PM EST
For years I’ve felt sure that if I only had a better haircut - or maybe gone to business school - I’d be a millionaire by now. However, certain discoveries have revealed that neither an MBA from Wharton nor a long blond mane from a master extensionist would have boosted my bottom line. It’s the garage, stupid. Or, to be more precise, the lack of one.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw from the latest ‘‘garage-to-riches” tale - in this case, the YouTube guys who sold the company they started in a garage to Google, for $1.65 billion. Google, by the way, got its start in a garage, just like Hewlett-Packard before it.
I never had a chance. Growing up in New York City and then moving to Boston right after college - with a brief teenage stop in the suburbs - I had garage access for only a few years. And in high school, I was too busy perfecting a tan to spend quality time creating a multinational corporation in the garage. How could I have known of the damage I was doing to my future earnings - and my skin?
So I was sitting around, reading about the lore of the Silicon Valley garage, the Menlo Park of our generation, and lusting after a windowless structure with a cement floor, when I began to have my doubts. I mean, with all that brainstorming behind the automatic door, where did they put the cars?
And even assuming these people lacked cars, what about all the junk? In my experience, people who don’t park their cars in the garage can’t. Too many old paint cans, unused pieces of exercise equipment, Christmas decorations, bulk purchases of bottled water and spare parts for the Victrola. And even if, let’s say, there was room for a minivan and storage and office space, wouldn’t it have been more pleasant to work in a tiny corner of the kitchen, or spread out the papers - or computers - on an unused dining roomtable?
I don’t know about you, but I sense the hand of an image consultant, coaching YouTube’s founders to say they started in a garage. Oily rags to riches, so to speak. And it worked. Practically every article I read mentioned not only the garage, but how humble the guys are.
Which gave me a glimmer of hope. True, with housing prices in Greater Boston being what they are, I don’t see a garage in my immediate future. But humble’s within reach. Now, if only I had something to be humble about.
