Story of Bill Gross forming GoTo / Overture

John Battelle tells the story about Bill Gross's arbitrage candy selling as a kid, and how he later came to form GoTo, which pioneered the underlying business model that currently powers search.

I heavily practiced arbitrage with baseball cards when I was young. Below is my arbitrage story.
When I was 10 I remember this one guy had a game where it costed 50 cents to roll dice and win the prize. I kept landing packs of the first run 1990 Donruss baseball cards with the Harold Baines reverse negative and other error cards. I kept selling the packs for $3 - $5 to other dealiers, to go back and do more rolling. By the time the day was done I had a Tony Gwynn rookie, a Brett Saberhagan rookie, and about a couple hundred dollars worth of other cards from $5 spent on the roll a dice game.

Around the same time I remember buying Score Dream Team cards in bulk near book price and selling them to a dealer two tables over for double book price.

In high school I started selling baseball cards. I would buy cards out of people's 3 for a dime and quarter boxes and sell the cards for $1 each. It was an easy sell to have a huge case full of cards worth 25 cents to $4 each and organize them by player and just price them all at $1 each. It allowed people who did not collect baseball cards to start buying their favorite player at my table.

Sorry for the tangent...arbitrage is such a yummy topic. I don't collect baseball cards much anymore, but those are some fond childhood memories :)

Published: August 6, 2005 by Aaron Wall in marketing

Comments

Add new comment

(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.

New to the site? Join for Free and get over $300 of free SEO software.

Once you set up your free account you can comment on our blog, and you are eligible to receive our search engine success SEO newsletter.

Already have an account? Login to share your opinions.

Gain a Competitive Advantage Today

Your top competitors have been investing into their marketing strategy for years.

Now you can know exactly where they rank, pick off their best keywords, and track new opportunities as they emerge.

Explore the ranking profile of your competitors in Google and Bing today using SEMrush.

Enter a competing URL below to quickly gain access to their organic & paid search performance history - for free.

See where they rank & beat them!

  • Comprehensive competitive data: research performance across organic search, AdWords, Bing ads, video, display ads, and more.
  • Compare Across Channels: use someone's AdWords strategy to drive your SEO growth, or use their SEO strategy to invest in paid search.
  • Global footprint: Tracks Google results for 120+ million keywords in many languages across 28 markets
  • Historical data: since 2009, before Panda and Penguin existed, so you can look for historical penalties and other potential ranking issues.
  • Risk-free: Free trial & low price.
Your competitors, are researching your site

Find New Opportunities Today