1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire »

Sam Wyly, a self-made billionaire of Scottish and Irish descent, grew up in Louisiana and attended Louisiana Tech to study journalism and accounting. He won a scholarship to the University of Michigan Business School, where he earned an MBA. With his brother, Charles, his partner in many of his businesses, Sam funded the Charles Wyly Sr. Tower of Learning at Louisiana Tech, in memory of their father.
Always an avid reader and student of history, he recently purchased the independent bookstore Explore Booksellers and Bistro in Aspen, Colorado, with his wife, Cheryl. Sam is also an active proponent of clean air through clean energy. He has lived most of his adult life in Dallas, and also spends time in Aspen and New York’s Greenwich Village.

“My work is to create companies and build them,” writes Sam Wyly in this candid, engrossing memoir, which reveals how he established and expanded companies on the leading edge of advancements in technology, energy, retail, and investments over the last forty-five years. Wyly shares the process, relationships, struggles, and strategies that have made him one of the 1,000 wealthiest people in the world. From the hardships his parents faced trying to hold on to the family cotton farm during the Depression to the coaching he received on the high school football field, this self-made billionaire describes how his early years in Louisiana prepared him for what lay ahead. His sales experience with IBM and Honeywell in Dallas in the early 1960s gave him the idea to start the first “computer utility.” Risking $1,000 of his savings, he founded University Computing in 1963 and took it public two years later, becoming a millionaire at the age of thirty.
Part autobiography and part inspirational business guide, this audio is full of refreshing insights about what it takes to create, grow, and build successful companies.

Publishers Weekly

Country boy makes good in this down-home tale of self-made multimillionaire Wyly. In his humble post-Depression Louisiana roots, Wyly learned his first business lessons from football strategy, his fathera's tiny newspaper business and his mothera's bargaining skills. A lucky meeting propelled him to the University of Michigana's Business School and his first corporate job at IBM, where he had to work fast to keep from succumbing to culture shock as he discovered "there aina't no Bubbas in Michigan." Energetic and restless, he soon left IBM for Honeywell and then created his own technology companies, rescuing failing businesses, founding Green Mountain Energy and devoting himself to environmentalism. Citing Sam Walton as a hero and Ross Perot as a personal friend, Wyly stresses the power and privilege of self-creation and speaks honestly about what hea's learned: that failure is crucial to achieving success, independent thought is imperative, luck serendipitous and power useless unless it is wielded for good. Though the message is a good one, the meandering storytelling and not well-known author might make this book a hard sell to a trade audience. (Sept.)

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Prologue     1
"Beat Tallulah"     4
Flora's Boys     14
Big Blue     26
Peter Drucker Wrote the Bible     32
Reach for a Star, Not a Handful of Mud     43
Me and Ross Perot     55
The Birth of a Company     58
A Thousand Dollars and an Idea     71
Multinational Entrepreneur     81
If You Can't Join 'em, Beat 'em     90
Monopoly Buster: Datran, or Die Trying     96
Before There Was Software, There Was Don Thomson     108
Earth Resources     115
Bonanza     129
Taking My Losses     138
Sterling Software     142
Money's Not Scarce     158
Never Let Your Pocketbook Tell You What You Can Do     174
The Crafty Woman     191
Maverick Investor     209
The Good Earth     226
Epilogue     240
Acknowledgments     249
Index     251