Rex Shelby spent a year of his 30s writing a novel, which never got published. He also spent that year training for triathlons. Then he started a company with a friend. It was an IT consulting firm based on a business plan Shelby had written in MBA school (he did not make a great grade on that plan). They managed to land enough work to get going, then they grew the business. The company was later acquired by a much larger IT consulting firm called The Information Consulting Group (ICG).
He then went to work for McKinsey. McKinsey bored him because it was basically writing reports all day. He needed more stimulation. So he and a friend from McKinsey started Modulus. Everybody at Modulus was dirt poor. They built the company one customer at a time, starting in a single room without windows. Rex once had a desk in the hallway and an old computer monitor that blinked all the time. They added one computer, one person, and one room at a time as they grew. If Modulus had failed, they all would have been flat broke.
When Enron acquired Modulus, Rex was quite happy. He liked the company a great deal. When he was given his options, he exercised them as soon as he could because, as you can see from his past, he doesn’t like keeping money in companies that he has no direct control over.
And now he’s going to a halfway house because he sold stock that he never wanted, never asked for. It is so wrong. I just keep going back to that sentence; it’s a mantra, a prayer, a chant.
But don’t expect him to stay down for long. He’s Rex Shelby. You might never hear from him again – he’s never been someone who hogs the limelight – but if I know anything, its that he’ll be somewhere building a company, creating something, and doing the entrepreneurial work that the rest of depend on for our very survival.
