1. Name- Pratik Gandhi
Case-study on an Intrapreneur
What is an Intrapreneur?
An Intrapreneur is a person who is innovative, creative, backed up by self-motivation, able
to think out of the box and has a zest to do whatever he is passionate of doing.
As a matter of fact there are two main types of Intrapreneurs:
1. The one who does innovative practices as an employee. They have the substantial
finances of the company back their efforts and they can also take advantage of
connections, experience, and skills available to the company.
2. The one who is Innovative and creative however, also is passionate about having
an own Business. They are usually backed-up with identifying the merits and work
on developing the idea into something workable in the real world.
As a part of the case study and to lay down a challenging option, we will be taking in
consideration with the second category of an Intrapreneur from mentioned above.
Abstract:
If you think about all the people that have high paying jobs, you’ll notice that some are
talented and others are not. Regardless of how good they are, they are all perceived as
“rock stars”. So what is this rock star formula anyhow? Some days ago, I didn’t know the
answer, but now I think I’ve got it. If you want to become a “rock star” in your industry, you
have come to the right place.
Neil Patel -- Tenacious Blogger, Angel Investor, Guerrilla Marketer, Passionate Leader,
Door-to-door Salesman and a Serial Intrapreneur.
Neil Patel is the co-founder of two Internet companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.
Through these two companies he has helped large corporations such as eBay, Microsoft,
Sun Microsystems, TechCrunch, Walmart, and Zappos make more money from the web.
By the age of 21 Neil was named one of the top influencers on the web by the Wall Street
Journal as well as quoted in magazines such as Entrepreneur for his insights on the new
aged web. During his free time, Neil enjoys blogging at Quick Sprout.
The Early Years
Born in London, UK and then brought up in USA, His uncle’s entrepreneurship rubbed off
on her moms who encouraged her to start her own home daycare business, but it never
revenued more than $100,000 a year and his dad was satisfied with his average job. He
always had Entrepreneurship in his blood as was always attached with such people in the
society.
Entrepreneurship:
2. At school, his cousin, who is a year older than Neil, was selling burned music CDs to
students at the time. Neil saw how he was making a few bucks so started doing the same
thing within his freshmen class. He quickly realized that he could only make a few dollars
a CD, so he started selling bootleg movies. Soon after he was known as the kid in high
school who was selling anything pirated.
The Corporate Life:
Because his income from my businesses was not stable, He decided to get a “real” job.
He was only 15 and the only local place He could pick up a job was at Knott’s Berry Farm,
in the park services department. The department he worked in sounded cool, but he was
in charge of picking up trash, emptying trashcans, cleaning restrooms, and sweeping up
vomit. Although the job sounded bad, he loved it because he got paid a few cents more
per hour for cleaning the restrooms compared to most of the jobs at Knott’s Berry Farm.
After 3 months of working at Knott’s, he quit and picked up a job at Quality Systems. He
was selling a $1600 Kirby vacuum. After doing this for a month or so shockingly he sold a
vacuum to an Indian couple. Realizing that the average American could not afford to buy
a $1600 vacuum, he decided to look for other career opportunities. His sister was working
for an Oracle consultant locally and she introduced him to Neil. He found out that as an
Oracle consultant, his sister’s boss was billing companies 125 to 250 dollars an hour. He
was shocked to hear how much he was making, which lead the Intrapreneur within him to
come out once again. He tried to figure out how he could also make that much as a high
school student, so he turned to Monster.com and started looking for Oracle consulting
jobs. The problem was, he had no clue what Oracle was.
.COM boom:
Instead of finding a job on Monster.com he learned about Monster.com’s business model
and how they were making hundreds of millions of dollars. As a kid, he thought that if he
could even make 1% of what they did, he would be rich. This lead him starting his own job
board called Advice Monkey. After spending 5 grand to build the job board, He launched
it and learned that you have to market a site for it to be successful.
Knowing that he needed some help with marketing, he hired an Internet marketing firm.
Within a few months he learned they were taking my money and doing nothing valuable
in exchange, so he fired them. He then hired two more firms who also provided little to no
results.
Since He was broke because a few Internet marketers took all his money, he decided to
learn Internet marketing myself and within a few months he became pretty good at it.
Advice Monkey started to become popular, but it never succeeded because the site was
not setup to take credit card transactions.
The real Intrapreneur:
The Internet marketing company started taking off and as a kid he thought he was “rolling
in dough”. With the money he made he started investing in a few other companies. He
invested around a million dollars into a hosting company called Vision Web Hosting that
never worked out (sadly he lost all of the money he invested into it). After realizing
investing wasn’t for him, his business partner and Neil took the rest of the money we
made and created another company called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg created a lot
of buzz when it came out and he surely thought he would end up selling it for 10 million
3. dollars. When he wasn’t able to get an asking price of 10 million dollars for Crazy Egg his
business partner and Neil decided that we were going to raise venture capital because
Crazy Egg wasn’t a profitable company.
After pitching Crazy Egg to venture capitalists for 6 months, He realized no one was going
to invest in it. Because of this I had no choice other than to figure out how to make Crazy
Egg profitable.
Evidence of Success:
This now brings up to date. Other than the Internet marketing company he also co-
founded a few more companies such as KISSmetrics, which funny enough got funded
by True Ventures who he once pitched Crazy Egg too. Some of the companies he co-
founded didn’t do well and made him lose a lot of money whereas others have done
great. But after 23 years of living he has learned one really important thing: life isn’t fair! If
you don’t like the cards you are dealt with, do something to change them. And for some
ungodly reason, if you are unable to change them, keep moving forward and don’t look
back. All you can do is keep trying.
Reflections and Future Developments
He wishes he had a crystal ball that could tell him what the future holds for him, but he
doesn’t have one. Luckily enough, He has made more money than he has lost and he
has been able to leverage that money into investments like apartment complexes,
houses, .com companies, the stock market, venture capital funds, and best of all his
parents.
Over the next few years his number 1 goal is to share what he has learned with people so
that everyone in the world can have a better life than him.
This is was a real-time e-interview which was acknowledged by Neil Patel himself for the
case study.
Thanking Neil Patel
Home Email: neil@neilpatel.com
Work Phone: +1-562-292-3834
Mobile Phone: +1-562-237-2515
AIM: neil162
MSN: neil168
Yahoo: neilk_patel
Skype: neil162
Home Address:
737 Olive Way
#2006,
Seattle,
WA 98101
Also published and streamed at the same time @ http://www.ipratikgandhi.blogspot.com/
