I was talking to someone this week who said they really enjoyed the Laser Storm story, and said they must have missed the third one. Nope, that’s on me. I forgot to post it. Sorry.
In 1992, Laser Storm rolled the dice, investing every last dollar we had into an exhibit at IAAPA Dallas, in a last-gasp effort to generate sales. Over the four-day event, we suffered the total destruction of our booth, not once but twice. Here are parts one and two if you missed them.
After the show, we scraped together enough leads to keep the company on life support. Interest in laser tag as a category was growing, and the market was being validated by new competitors. Our business had survived its darkest days.
And then one day the following summer, my phone rang.
“Bobby! You ready to go gold panning?”
Shit. I’d forgotten that in a desperate attempt to sell a system to The Enchanted Castle in Chicago, I’d told the owner, Harold Skripsky, that I knew how to pan for gold in the mountains of Colorado. He’d since purchased a system from our competitor, Q-Zar, so I moved on. But he had not.
“I’m coming in August,” Harold warned. “You sure you’re OK with this?”
He was giving me an out. I really can’t remember what I was thinking when I said, “Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it.”
I had a couple of months to research and prepare. It would be fun.
Of course, running a bootstrap tech company can be all-consuming. So it caught me by surprise when Harold called me again to remind me he was coming…in a week!
There was a big Army-Navy Surplus store on Broadway just south of Downtown. I figured they’d have something. So I drove over with the hope of outfitting with the right gear so I didn’t look like the total bullshit artist I obviously was. I asked the guy behind the counter, and he helped me find a shovel, a pickaxe, and some gold pans. I threw in a pair of chest waders and figured that would suffice.
I’d been living in Colorado for about seven years by then. When I first moved to Colorado, I rented an old ranch house on 160 acres of land in Woodland Park, west of Colorado Springs. It was at the base of Pikes Peak, and from the front yard, the views were breathtaking. I pretty much always owned a 4WD, so I knew how to navigate the mountains. I had a collection of topological maps I used when off-roading and camping. I was reasonably confident I could get Harold to a river, and we could pan for gold and hopefully find some.
Harold met me with the biggest grin I’d ever seen. He was excited to finally prospect for gold. We loaded his bags, and I drove the jeep west on I-70 towards Idaho Springs, one of the boomtowns during the gold rush era. They still had an active mine tour, and I figured we could find a stream to muck around in.
We pulled into town and got out the maps. We found a stream that looked accessible from a jeep trail, and we headed up higher into the mountain. Harold was a great navigator, and we soon pulled up next to a picturesque stream that looked promising. We got out my shiny new gold pans and perched down at the edge of the water. We dug some dirt into the pan, and swirled it around as I’d seen in some old western movie. Harold eyed me suspiciously as I got excited about some iron pyrite I saw sparkling on the ground. Fool’s gold.
About 10 minutes in, he smiled and asked,
“You’ve never done this before, have you?”
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It was that obvious. I was the fool. But we had a good laugh about it. And Harold was grateful for the effort and for getting him out to the Colorado gold country. He suggested we head into town and try to find a guide. We drove back down the trail into Idaho Springs. Along the main street, there was a big tavern. We pulled into the parking lot and strode inside. Harold walked up to the bartender,
“We want to go gold panning and need a guide. Can you help us?”
“Ahh, you want to talk to Black Hat Billy! Come back at 4 o’clock, and he’ll be here. Just look for the hillbilly with the black hat and the beautiful blonde.”
You can’t make this shit up. Black Hat Billy? I felt like I had stepped into a Sergio Leone movie set. So we thanked him, ordered a couple of beers, and shot the shit for a while. When it was time to check in to the motel, we drove over to drop our bags and then head back over to the tavern. We walked through the swinging doors and scanned the bar. Sure enough, at a booth across the bar was a rough-looking dude with a ratty black hat and a scraggly, triangle-shaped beard that hung down to his solar plexus. And sure enough, he was sitting there talking to a beautiful blonde-haired woman.
We sidled up to the table and excused ourselves for the interruption. He was expecting us – I guess the bartender had clued him in that a couple of stooges from the city were looking to get fleeced. Harold did the talking. Billy said to meet him back here at 8 AM. And to bring a can of gas, and a suitcase of Busch Beer.
“Are you sure we’ll find gold?” queried Harold.
Billy just smiled and said, “8 o’clock sharp.”
Harold was excited, and I was relieved. Somehow, I’d managed to get him in the position to live out his fantasy. And we were having fun. We grabbed dinner and made an early night of it.
The next morning, we turn up, and sure enough, Billy is there with his beat-up pickup truck filled with legit prospecting gear. We followed him down the road, crossed the river on a rickety bridge, and drove down a mining road to the edge of Cripple Creek, the big river that runs alongside Interstate 70 as you head up to the Continental Divide and the ski resorts. It’s a mountain playground for river rafting, kayaking, trout fishing, and I guess, gold prospecting.
Billy had a gold camp set up along the river. He’d been working this plot of Clear Creek for years. He had set up a dredge that uses a high-powered pump to pull dirt and gravel from the riverbed and spit them into a sluice box. The sluice separates the fine river sediment from the gravel. He showed us how it worked, and we took turns in waders, dredging Cripple Creek. It was back-breaking work.
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| Me dredging a hole in Clear Creek while Harold looks on in his gold panning vest. |
We took turns about every 15 minutes. After a while, the sluice box would be filled with sediment. Billy turned off the pump and dumped the sediment into a big bucket. He then showed us the art of panning. We take a handful of sediment from the bucket and swirl it around the pan with the clear river water, washing away the dirt little by little. Gold is way heavier than dirt, and tends to stay at the bottom of the pan.
We swirled and swirled, and the first pans yielded nothing. But as we got a bit further down the bucket, Harold yelled, “Bobby! Check it out! Gold!”
I set down my pan and walked over, peering over his shoulder as he crouched in the river.
“Holy shit, Harold! You did it?”
We spent the next two days dredging the river. Harold had brought some small vials to store his gold. I gave him what I found to add to his collection. We even found a couple of little nuggets, no bigger than a mosquito’s body, but big enough to stand out from the rest, which were barely the size of a grain of sand.
Harold was happy, I was relieved, and we were becoming fast friends. We headed back down the mountain to show him our Laser Storm at FunPlex. He was complimentary, promised to stay in touch, and said he would come back next summer for more gold.
A few months later, Harold called me back. He was still buzzing from our gold panning adventure. But he had big news. He had just sold Enchanted Castle to Discovery Zone and was staying on as an executive to help them grow their attraction business. Discover Zone was a spinoff from Blockbuster Video. It was a children’s play center featuring a massive, three-story-tall playground. These playgrounds had become super popular at McDonald’s, turning the fast food giant into a birthday party behemoth. Blockbuster saw an opportunity to capitalize on this trend by building standalone playground centers. They were expanding rapidly, and now wanted to add laser tag.
While Q-Zar was a better fit for Enchanted Castle, Laser Storm was a perfect fit for Discovery Zone’s younger customers. The equipment was lightweight, easy to use, and we could build an arena in less than half the space.
So Harold came back out, and we negotiated the biggest sale in our history. We would start with 10 locations and grow from there. When the deal came through, we were days away from filing for bankruptcy. Now we were off to the races.
You need to let them settle so the dirt can wash away before you see them.
When the booth collapsed on the first day of IAAPA the prior year, I could have driven home, shut down the company, and moved on to the next thing. Instead, I sought out the comfort of a friend, whose compassion and enthusiasm gave me the motivation to keep trying.
And when rain destroyed our second try, I could have thrown in the towel. I imagine most people might have at that point. I remember standing there laughing, and my team just looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But at that point, I was ready to challenge the entire universe. “Is that all you got? Come on, give me your best shot!”
If I could do it over again, I certainly wouldn’t have lied to Harold about my gold panning experience. I would have said, “No, never been. But would love to try with you.” But I didn’t have that level of confidence back then.
Looking back, I am sure that some of the things I promised to prospective customers were aspirational at best. But they were backed by a belief in myself, my team, and the concept. Had we not stuck through three rebuilds of our booth in Dallas, I doubt I would have met Harold. We would never have gone gold panning in Colorado and become friends. And I doubt we would have gotten the Discovery Zone contract. We might have gone out of business, leaving the customers who backed us in the beginning stranded. We could have been called frauds, liars, or thieves.
Instead, we went on to be ranked the 251st-fastest-growing private company in America, on the way to a successful NASDAQ IPO. Laser Storm peaked in 1998 with 230 locations in over 30 countries. And even today, dozens of locations are still running almost 30 years after we effectively shut down the business.
Lately, there’s been a lot written about startups that achieve unicorn status, which is a valuation of more than one billion dollars before going public. Some of those have become massive failures, bordering on fraud. Adam Naumann, who founded WeWork, had his story made into a Netflix series. He’s been vilified by the media and called a criminal. He’s also been lauded by Marc Andreesen, Adam’s original venture capital investor. Andreesen has recently backed him in his next venture, despite his flameout at WeWork.
My grandfather used to say, “There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity.” As a lifelong entrepreneur, I would say there’s a fine line between belief and deception. To overcome the incredible obstacles to bringing an idea to life as a business, founders have to maintain an almost insane level of belief in their idea and vision. If I had listened to everyone who told me that Laser Storm would never work, I’d have given up before I started. And even as we were growing, there was never a shortage of skeptics.
I’ve told this story many times, and for most entrepreneurs, their takeaway is to never give up. “Just keep swimming”, as Dory said to Nemo.
But there’s a bigger lesson here.
We cannot know what’s going to happen. How could I have planned for our booth’s collapse twice? If I knew that, would I have even gone to the show? And if someone said I would need to take someone gold panning to close the company’s biggest sale, I’d have laughed.
We are so busy following our plans that we miss out on unexpected opportunities. Life is complex; we can’t possibly predict how all the various elements will come together. I’ve spent most of my career responding to what happens rather than rigidly following a plan. For me, when things don’t go my way, I just assume that it’s because my way wasn’t the best way.
Stay in the river, and keep digging. And Harold, if you’re reading this…I love you.
With love,
Bob
PS. Harold and I became good friends. He ultimately served on my board of directors at Laser Storm. And we kept making trips to Colorado to prospect for gold. In fact, on one of those trips, he saved my life. But that’s a story for another day.
PPS. My first ever employee at Laser Storm, Chad Watkins, became part of this story, too. Maybe I’ll write about that one next.
