A successful serial entrepreneur speaks about the real power of fame.
A monster under your bed is nothing to fear. At least that’s what Jeff Taylor discovered. Each evening he lovingly tucked his children into their beds, only to return to reassure them there were no monsters under their beds. Because the monster was surprisingly lurking under his own bed instead. Taylor retired restless one evening amidst the challenges of growing his start-up ad agency. “What would happen if advertising could become a digital bulletin board?” He turned the question over in his mind. The question was particularly provocative, given it was the early 1990’s. No stranger to midnight musings, Taylor placed a notebook and a pen on his bedside table in hopes of insomniac inspiration. At 4 a.m., he awoke to a monster of an idea. “What would happen if there were a monster bulletin board for job postings?” Taylor wiped the sleep out of the corners of his eyes and jotted down the idea. And then his mind started reeling. What if….? Taylor jumped out of bed like a man on a mission and headed to the nearest coffee shop. His fingers flew across the keys in a caffeinated craze. “The Monster Board may be the kindest monster to ever appear to someone in a dream,” Taylor jokes and laughs as he recalls the journey to become, as he calls it, “Chief Monster.” He sketched the monster logo himself by hand, drawing inspiration from his kids’ love of dinosaurs. A bigger-than-life idea deserved a bigger-than-life logo, or so his reasoning went. His investors and his wife at the time, by contrast, saw a strategy to become extinct. “My investors told me Monster was a distraction,” he recalls, shaking his head.
