Man Becomes 'Accidental Millionaire' After Jet.com's Sale To Walmart (fortune.com)

The acquisition of Jet.com by Walmart for $3 billion in cash appears to have made the founder of IdeaDash an "accidental millionaire." Fortune reports: "Martin, who is the founder of a startup called IdeaDash, won Jet.com's nationwide marketing competition -- Jet Insider -- in early 2015. The contest offered a reward of 100,000 shares of Jet stock to the contestant who got the most people to sign up for 6-month free trial 'insider' memberships to the membership shopping site, a sort of online Costco or Sam's Club. According to his company's website, Martin took first place out of the 350,000 people who participated, getting over 8,000 people to sign up. Martin spent $18,000 on online ads, Bloomberg reports, and now has a stake in Jet that is reportedly worth millions. Although Martin told Bloomberg that he is not sure exactly what his stake is worth, Fusion reported in February 2015 that his piece could be valued between $10 million and $20 million."

Comments

More like

[Anonymous Coward]

Man with a plan finally sees the fruits of his efforts after several years

Accidental?

[subk]

Sure sounds to me like he had a plan, having spent almost $20K of his own money to win the contest.

Re:Accidental?

[subk]

What about the other guy who spent $19k and didn't win shit?

Put the pipe down, AC. It wasn't $18,000 worth of lottery tickets, the winner was chosen based on performance (amount of referrals).. $18,000 was the cost of implementing his strategy. Which happened to be the best one. If someone else spent $19,000 on a less successful strategy, well that's the way the cookie crumbles.

You can call the boosted post-acquisition Jet.com stock value a windfall, but I find no reasonable way of calling it an "accident".