Reinventing the Pawn Shop
When his family lost their Colorado farm in the late 1980s, a young Todd Hills went into town to pawn his saddle. “I got a lot less than the saddle was worth,” says Hills, ”but I walked away with a job.” That’s right: He went to work for the pawn broker — and had soon worked his way up the company ladder. He later struck out on his own and eventually sold his own 30-store pawn operation to a publicly traded firm in 2007. At that point, he stepped back and looked at the industry through a different lens. He saw two phenomena going on at the same time. One, the internet was developing into an ideal medium for scaling the traditional pawn model. And two, the financial crisis was creating a new kind of cash-crunched customer – middle- and upper-class folks, as well as entrepreneurs, looking for a financing alternative. In 2009, Hills launched Pawngo, which he initially called Internet Pawn. “At first people thought I was crazy to think people would mail in their valuables,” ...
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Venture Capital Reduces Risk Appetite
Venture capitalists are reining in their spending in areas like the consumer Internet following the disappointing stock market performances of recently public Web companies Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.
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facebook
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zynga
Companies fight to control access to the online bazaar
How giants like Amazon and Groupon are competing to serve as the consumer gateway to the Internet
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groupon
internet
Found more than 1 month ago on channel
CBS
Some Groupon Investors Give Up
Some of Groupon's early backers, including Marc Andreessen, are heading for the exits, joining investors who have lost faith in companies that had been expected to drive a new Internet boom.
andreessen
groupon
internet
marc
China's Tencent Powers Ahead of Western Peers
As Western social-media and Internet companies from Facebook to Groupon struggle to meet investor expectations, their biggest peer in China is powering ahead.
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expectations
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