Adventure Capital

Elie Ashery had already seen two of his dreams come true. He raised $12 million in venture capital for a dotcom and used the proceeds from its sale to buy his first house.

Later, as a serial entrepreneur stuck at a consulting firm, Ashery wanted nothing more than to start again, this time with his own internet marketing business. But, at least in terms of being able to fund a startup, he was flat broke. In 2002, a door opened--the door to an abandoned storage unit.

"That was really the seed money for what Gold Lasso is today," Ashery says of his Maryland-based marketing firm. "Now I have a million-dollar-plus business that was funded from nothing."

Ashery, 33, was still at his consulting job when he noticed a client, a storage unit company, was holding an auction to sell off the contents of delinquent customers' units. So his business partner, Michael Weisel, decided to check it out, and after seeing sheds filled with everything from old books to pots and pans from a Chinese restaurant, he found a shed more to his liking--one filled with old file servers, licenses and other tech equipment from a defunct dot-com. He bought the contents of the unit for $5, they sold them online for $8,000 and the rest, as they say, is history--that startup seed has netted Gold Lasso $1.2 million worth of history this year alone.

"My partner actually bid five bucks," Ashery says. "I still have the receipt. It was like a treasure trove in there. We rented a U-Haul, threw it in my garage and said, 'Let's start this company.'"

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From Boy to (Business)ManA lot of entrepreneurs cite divine intervention when it comes to the inspiration for their businesses. But when it comes to startup funding, even the most powerful deity doesn't have much to offer. What almost every religion does have, on the other hand, is some sort of rite of passage for its youth. For Ross Siegel, $400 in savings bonds as bar mitzvah gifts put the then-13-year-old on the path to starting his own private media empire.

"I had some money, and what I would've done with it is spend it on records or something," Siegel, 30, says. "Somebody said to me, 'Ross, we're going to give you money when you're 13, and hopefully by the time you're 20, you can use it for something good, whatever that is.' So I felt I would use this for records, but if I can manage to turn this into a business touching on the music industry, maybe I can turn this into more records. The upshot is that even though I haven't done the magazine in four years, I still get records sent to me to this day."

Siegel heeded the advice. When he discovered the old bonds in a safe deposit box in 1997 while he was a student at Cornell, he bought some desktop publishing software and started Law of Inertia, an Ithaca, New York-based indie music magazine, out of his dorm room.

By 2002, Siegel had moved to New York City to attend film school, and the magazine was bringing in six-figure ad revenues. He was half-heartedly heading toward a career in advertising, but at the time, the job market was tough, so he decided to turn the magazine into his full-time career.

"I didn't know anything about running a magazine, let alone running a business, but I had already built up a really good brand and a really good base," Siegel says. "Part of the problem with the magazine world is that it's so incredibly hard to build up a brand."

Within a year of that decision, Law of Inertia had 20,000 subscribers and seven figures worth of corporate advertising revenue. Convinced the proliferation of the internet would kill the magazine, Siegel sold it to a record labelin 2003 and used the proceeds to start his own record label, ReIgnition Recordings.