Labor is stultifying and moribund. Capital is creative and life-affirming. The key element distinguishing labor from capital is risk. What a contrast to the superwealthy venture capitalists who staked HomePortfolio, all of them titans who gobble life by the fistful. He phones friends, relatives, venture capitalists, next-door neighbors, total strangers, even NBC anchorman Stone Phillips, trying to drum up funds to keep HomePortfolio afloat.
Capitalism is about capital, nowhere more so than at an online startup.
Desperate for cash, Ashbrook and his partner shoulder hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt as their wives protest at the ruin of their family finances. Ashbrook's book is worth reading for its harrowing depiction of the insatiable hunger for capital, the endless credit crises and the humiliating necessity to sell oneself and one's carefully nurtured equity stake to any and every moneyman. But while others might view this saga as a dehumanizing tragedy, Ashbrook turns it into a swelling Nietzschean rhapsody. If I couldn't dial that number, then I wasn't cut out for this entrepreneurial thing. I was just another good schmo on the assembly line, waiting for his plant to close.