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| | == Personal Life == | | == Personal Life == |
| | Mr. Marc was born in Los Angeles, his dad was a professor at UCLA. He has five daughters Kelly, Shelly and Tracy Ostrofsky. Kelly and Shelly are identical twins, they graduate co-valedictorians of their high school | | Mr. Marc was born in Los Angeles, his dad was a professor at UCLA. He has five daughters Kelly, Shelly and Tracy Ostrofsky. Kelly and Shelly are identical twins, they graduate co-valedictorians of their high school |
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| | + | When he was 5, he ran his own lemonade stand and says "that's the way to learn business as a kid!" He was a major donor to lemonade day, which teaches kids entrepreneurship. Once, his neighbor asked him to clean his car, when he was 7, the neighbor gave him $10 for cleaning his car. After this, he started waxing cars. After a few years, he moved to Houston with his family. He decided to join University of Texas to study BBA. |
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| | + | When he was in College he crossed path with a fellow student, who is one of the most popular Entrepreneurs of America today. He says that his family broker asked Marc to work for their son, who had just started a computer building business in his dorm. Marc refused saying that he would look silly working for a guy two years younger than him. The dorm company grew to become DELL. |
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| | + | After graduating from college, he landed a national magazine because of his entreprenurial businesses in the college. As a result of this magazine publicity, he received several job offers but refused them because he wanted to do "his own thing". After a while, he found what he was looking for "Telecom deregulation had just happened," Ostrofsky says. "I was walking down the street and met a guy hawking "DISCOUNT LONG DISTANCE SERVICE" on the street. The cards he was handing out claimed the service saved the user 50-70% off of AT&T's prices. I asked him "do you actually get paid for giving this to me? and he said yes, I get 25% of the third month's bill plus $5 for every card I give away. OMG! I had found what I wanted - a serious gold mine!". He went to Dallas and joined the company, after he made several sales, he was made the Sales Manager because of his skills. |
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| | == Education == | | == Education == |
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| − | When he was 5, he ran his own lemonade stand and says "that's the way to learn business as a kid!" He was a major donor to lemonade day, which teaches kids entrepreneurship. Once, his neighbor asked him to clean his car, when he was 7, the neighbor gave him $10 for cleaning his car. After this, he started waxing cars. After a few years, he moved to Houston with his family. He decided to join University of Texas to study BBA.
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| − | During his college years Ostrofsky also crossed paths with a fellow student who would go on to become of America's most successful entrepreneurs ever. "I placed the little bit of money I had made with a family friend who was our family's stock broker in Houston. Brokers worked with partners and his was a nice lady named Lorainne Dell. One day when I called my broker, Mrs. Dell answered. She asked me if I would be interested in working for her son to help him with marketing. He had started a computer building business in his dorm room at UT. I told her I knew her son Michael but wouldn't work for a kid that was two years younger than I was because I would look silly to my fraternity brothers! I tell folks if I had been his Marketing Director, Michael Dell (of Dell Computer fame) might be a bum on the streets of Austin these days!," Ostrofsky laughed.
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| − | When Ostrofsky graduated he scored another marketing coup, one that landed him in a national magazine. "Newsweek Magazine ran a story about the many entrepreneurial businesses I had started and operated while in college," Ostrofsky said. "I had five different business
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| − | cards and that was the photo that ran with the story in Newsweek. Thanks to the publicity, I had a lot of job offers when I graduated but turned all of them down because I really wanted to do my own thing," Ostrofsky said.
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| − | Upheaval in the Telecom Industry Gives Ostrofsky His First BIG Payday
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| − | It didn't take him long to find the opportunity he was looking for. "Telecom deregulation had just happened," Ostrofsky said. "I was walking down the street and met a guy hawking "DISCOUNT LONG DISTANCE SERVICE" on the street. The cards he was handing out claimed the service saved the user 50-70% off of AT&T's prices. I asked him "do you actually get paid for giving this to me? and he said yes, I get 25% of the third month's bill plus $5 for every card I give away. OMG! I had found what I wanted - a serious gold mine!" Ostrofsky exclaimed.
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| − | With his interest piqued, Ostrofsky headed to Dallas to visit the company's headquarters. "It was a start up that was reselling Sprint service at the time. It was real and it worked!," Ostofsky said. "I made so much money so fast, they made me the sales manager of this firm and I opened up the Houston market."
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| − | "During that time, I attended a telecom industry trade show and learned about the pay telephone industry. Seemed like a smart market – a pay telephone just sat there, day after day, taking a lot of quarters and making a lot of money with very little expense. So while I planned to get into that business, I gathered so much information about the market that folks asked if they could buy my information because I had done all of the legwork for six months, had all of the info and could save them time and money if I could or would share it. That taught me about the value of information."
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| − | That in turn sent Ostrofsky down a new entrepreneurial path. "It led me to start a
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| − | Ostrofsky (right) with another
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| − | trade magazine called Private Pay Phone News. That quickly morphed into a full fledged magazine (PayPhone Magazine) which led me to start several magazines, research reports and trade shows, all in the deregulated telcom markets," Ostrofsky said. "Buyers needed information about sellers and sellers needed information about buyers and the guy in the middle (me) made the first money and often a lot of money supplying information about the market to all of the players in that market. In 12 years, I sold those two firms for almost $50 Million and never looked back."
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| − | Ostrofsky's Sister Points Him to the Opportunity of a Lifetime - Domain Names
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| | As successful as he turned out to be, Ostrofsky said the real brain in the family was a sibling who also happened to be the person who led him to domains. "My older sister Keri was the smart one," Ostrofsky said. She was really “book” smart - top 10 in her graduating class, Stanford MBA and Harvard PhD. She went on to become a college professor where I went to school - the University of Texas. When I went to visit her in 1994 to speak to her class about Entrepreneurship, she showed me this new thing she was researching called “The Internet.” After a few moments, the first thing I asked her was “how do you get one of those names?," Ostrofsky recalled. | | As successful as he turned out to be, Ostrofsky said the real brain in the family was a sibling who also happened to be the person who led him to domains. "My older sister Keri was the smart one," Ostrofsky said. She was really “book” smart - top 10 in her graduating class, Stanford MBA and Harvard PhD. She went on to become a college professor where I went to school - the University of Texas. When I went to visit her in 1994 to speak to her class about Entrepreneurship, she showed me this new thing she was researching called “The Internet.” After a few moments, the first thing I asked her was “how do you get one of those names?," Ostrofsky recalled. |