Cambridge Cluster

The obituaries are a strange place to look for business lessons on equity funding to build a business.  However the obituary of Chris Haney who helped to invent Trivial Persuit makes for interesting lessons.  It has it all: the inspiration, the perspiration, the desperation, the break, the envy and the success.  I quote:

“After a stint with the Canadian Press news agency he worked as a picture editor at the Montreal Gazette and met Abbott in December 1975 after being assigned to help with coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics held in Montreal.

The two developed their idea after work on December 15 1979 while playing a game of Scrabble in a bar and finding that some of the letters were missing.

Over a few beers, and scribbling on the back of some paper napkins, they sketched out a game based on questions of trivia, with a six-spoked circular board and six question categories: art and literature; history; science and nature; entertainment; geography; sport and leisure.

The following year Haney resigned his job and, with his wife and child, travelled to Spain, spending the autumn and winter of 1980 researching 6,000 questions across the categories. In the meantime, with his brother John, Scott Abbott, and a lawyer called Ed Werner, he set about raising $75,000 in capital to market the game. The foursome appealed to friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Some turned them down flat — but eventually 34 people each put up $1,000.

The first investor was one of Haney’s high school friends, who earned a return of some $50,000 in the first two years alone. Although the game went on sale in 1981 Haney said it was two years before they “saw a nickel” for the idea.

Initially 1,100 copies of the game went on sale in Canada for $15. The company Haney and Abbott formed to market the game, Horn Abbott, lost money on each of these initial sets, which cost $75 to make. Because none of the big games manufacturers was interested, Haney and his cohorts sold the game mainly via mail order.

After exhausting his savings, he was stricken with anxiety attacks, and spent some time in rehab. In February 1982 Haney and his team showed Trivial Pursuit at the New York Toy Fair, but found themselves allocated a room at the far end of a remote corridor; most of the people passing by were actually looking for the lavatory.

But when the game was featured on a television chat show, with the host reading out questions to the guests, sales picked up.

Originally developed under the name Six Thousand Questions, Trivial Pursuit now sells in more than 50 countries and 20 languages all over the world.

Haney became a multi-millionaire, and regularly took the Queen Mary II across the Atlantic to Europe — and especially his favourite country, Spain — because he was afraid of flying.

In 1984 and again in 1994 lawsuits were filed against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. One man claimed the creators had lifted questions from his trivia books. Another, who claimed he had been hitchhiking when Haney picked him up, said he had outlined his idea for a game and later realised that Haney had hijacked it. Both cases were thrown out, one by the US Supreme Court.”So sad that his life was cut short at the age of 59 years; an amazing entrepreneur among many other qualities and a great loss to his family and friends.