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)Man
A 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.

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