Billionaire Credits Success to 'Instinct, Analysis'
Aspen Daily News
David Danforth, Publisher
August 11, 2008
From high-tech companies to craft shops, from steakhouses to a little bookstore in Aspen, billionaire Sam Wyly’s business ventures don’t have much in common, except the entrepreneur behind them who saw a niche and turned it into a rollicking success.
Wyly, who splits his time among Dallas, Aspen and Greenwich Village, tells the tale of his rise from a Louisiana cotton farm to the exclusive club of billionaires in his recent memoir, “1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire.”
On Saturday, Wyly sat in front of a crowd of more than 50 enthusiasts pouring out of the back room of Explore Booksellers, which he and his wife Cheryl bought to save it from becoming yet another high-end Aspen condo complex, to share some of the secrets of the book in a conversation with Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson.
“Do you think a young Sam Wyly today could achieve the same success that you did 45 years ago?” Isaacson asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” Wyly said.
He attributed his string of successes to “partly instinct and partly analysis.”
Through his career, Wyly has demonstrated a knack for spotting ripe business opportunities and a knack for timing. In the process, he has tilted with some of the biggest corporate giants in America.
“I learned something about risk,” Wyly said of his life growing up on a cotton farm with a father who had wanted to be a writer and a mother who had wanted to be a dancer before the Depression left them caring for the family plantation.
After leaving IBM and Honeywell, Wyly founded University Computing, which he calls the first “computer utility,” with $1,000 of his savings in 1963. When he took it public two years later, he found himself a millionaire by age 30. “I really wanted to control my own destiny,” Wyly said.
His lawsuit against AT&T was one of three antitrust suits that led to the breakup of the monopoly.
Wyly co-founded Sterling Software and sold it for $4 billion. He co-founded Earth Resources Co., an oil-refining and silver-mining operation, and sold it before the commodities market tumbled in the 1980s. In the mid-’90s he founded Green Mountain Energy, the nation’s largest provider of “cleaner” energy, before alternative energy became popular.
“It was really a sense that something needed to be done,” said Wyly, who drives a Lexus hybrid. “But, that said, it had to be an economic opportunity.”
He co-founded hedge funds Maverick Capital & Ranger Capital. To bail out a friend, he bought the Bonanza Steakhouse chain and expanded it from 20 locations to more than 600. He bought the arts-and-crafts chain Michaels, expanded it to more than 900 stores, then sold it for $6 billion 18 months ago, before the market tumbled. Today, he said, it would probably be tough to sell it for half that.
Locally, though, Wyly is best known as the savior of Explore Booksellers, and even that purchase landed him on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Wyly said he and his wife Cheryl were longtime fans of the store. After owner Katherine Thalberg died in 2006, they bought the store to keep it from closing.
“Back in Dallas, my neighborhood bookstore, the one I could easily walk to, shut down,” Wyly said. “And then the one I could easily drive to shut down. These were independent booksellers. … I didn’t want to see that happen (here).”
However, some longtime bookstore fans were worried that Wyly, a supporter of Republican candidates including both President Bush and his father, would change the flavor of the store, which includes a vegetarian bistro upstairs. Both Thalberg, who was an animal-rights activist, and her husband, Bill Stirling, were famously liberal in a left-leaning town.
“We were all nervous about what would happen,” Stirling said. “These two have come forward and they have really continued this in terms of the literary and cultural and the moral center of town.”
The Wylys have also been famous philanthropists in the valley and elsewhere. “We have always given back to this community,” said Wyly.
