The Mouse Driver Chronicles: An Entrepreneurial Adventure
by John Lusk, Kyle Harrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Lusk, Kyle HarrisonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Published: 2002-09-02
ISBN: 0743221400
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of The Mouse Driver Chronicles: An Entrepreneurial Adventure
Book Review: Greg Fisher
Summary: 5 Stars
The Mousedriver Chronicles is the story of 2 Wharton MBA's who take a business plan developed on their entrepreneurship course at Wharton and decide to make a go of it. In 1999 they turn away high paying jobs at investment banks and over funded dot.com startups to go it alone.
Their idea: to make and sell a computer mouse that looks like the head of a golf driver.
They fund the venture themselves, find a manufacturer in Hong Kong, move to San Francisco (to be part of all the start up vibe in The Bay area) and run the business from the kitchen of their rented flat.
Their story is brilliantly relayed as they grapple with manufacturing, marketing and distribution hassles. The single product focus of their new company, named Platinum Concepts Inc., makes for a wonderful entrepreneurial story with excellent lessons about what it takes to succeed as a self funded start up. The two founders quickly learn that they need more than the theoretical knowledge acquired on their MBA at Wharton; they need to be street wise. They experiment with different mechanisms to make things happen and end up categorizing their execution strategies as follows:
Plan A: Make use of their business school network and contacts
Plan B: Hit the streets and the shops to find a creative solution
Plan C: Work the Yellow Pages
More often than not, plan B and C worked far better than plan A.
One of the founders, John Lusk, began sharing their entrepreneurial adventure with friends and family via a monthly email called "The Insider". The Insider was a real, often humorous, sometimes highly insightful newsletter about their adventure. The insider subscriber list grew and grew. MBA lecturers began distributing The Insider as prescribed reading. In 2001 Inc. Magazine featured a cover story on the company and its two founders. The Inc. cover story entitled "An American Start-up" focuses on the impact of The Insider e-mail newsletter. The email newsletters were used as the foundation for the book published in 2001 entitled The "Mousedriver Chronicles".
The company has since been shut down but the Mousedriver website still serves as a portal for entrepreneurs and copies of The Insider newsletter can be found in PDF format on the website: www.mousedriver.com
Summary of The Mouse Driver Chronicles: An Entrepreneurial Adventure
Created from their personal journals begun at business school comes an intimate, insightful and often funny look inside the minds of two young entrepreneurs as they chronicle the adventures of their start-up business. In the spring of 1999 John Lusk, erstwhile business school student and budding entrepreneur, found himself in a very difficult position. Graduation was fast approaching and he had yet to find the 'big idea' which would launch his undoubtedly successful start-up business and his entrepreneurial career. He knew that he didn't want to join his fellow students in the dot.com bonanza but that's about all he knew. Then one fortuitous day he came across Kyle Harrison, another Wharton man shying well clear of the dot.commers and looking for a start-up of his own. But what Kyle had in his favour was 'the idea'. Thus armed with their credit cards, MBA degrees and the very simple idea of a computer mouse shaped like the head of a golf driver, sketched out on the back of a coaster, the authors chronicle their successes, failures and the emotional rollercoaster as they strive to take their MouseDriver from classroom to shopfloor. Full of passion, wit and peppered with concrete information, this wonderfully entertaining book crosses the boundaries between pop culture and business and will appeal to anyone whether they are a would-be entrepreneur or not.John Lusk and Kyle Harrison seemed slightly out of their minds when, unlike their fellow MBAs, they skipped on flashy, lucrative offers from dot-coms to become entrepreneurs. Specifically, to produce and sell a computer mouse designed to look like a golf-club head (a state-of-the-art titanium driver to be exact). "I wanted to feel the pain of starting a company," Lusk writes in this clear and insightful memoir, "to go into debt, have my ego crushed and experience first-hand the thrill of working like a dog for months without a paycheck." Since he also expected to make a million in two years, it's not surprising that all these come to pass. The duo struggle with the fundamentals of making and selling, run-ins with typhoons, shabby off-shore manufacturing, and soon dot-com envy sets in. But when the dot-coms start going belly-up, this little-retail-product-company-that-could shows that the basics of business still apply--a handy lesson for those wondering what happened after the dot-com crash, as well as any would-be entrepreneurs wanting to make a go of it. --Lesley Reed
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