Boxes in the basement

It was the fall of 2005, and Ryan had just gotten back from Tokyo.

We were roommates at Wake Forest. The kind of roommates who spent more time kicking around business ideas than studying for exams. Every week it was something new. A sports-betting arbitrage scheme. A website that would do… something. Real estate. Stocks. Endless ideas. Zero execution.

Talk is cheap, and we were rich in talk.

Then Ryan showed me the photos.

Tree-lined streets in Tokyo, wrapped in LED Christmas lights that looked nothing like the hot, ice-cream-cone bulbs my parents strung on our house. These were crisp. Cool to the touch. They shimmered instead of glowed. You couldn't find anything like them in the US—not at Home Depot, not at Lowe's, nowhere.

"We should sell these," he said.

I'd heard that phrase a hundred times. We should. The graveyard of would-be entrepreneurs is full of we shoulds.

But something snapped. Maybe I was tired of talking. Maybe I wanted to know what it felt like to actually try.

"Okay," I said. "Let's do it."

We had no plan. No distribution. No retail relationships. No clue about logistics, customs, or product liability.

What we had was Skype and a woman named Alice.

She worked at a manufacturing warehouse somewhere in China. I don't remember how we found her—probably some early Alibaba knockoff, back when ordering overseas felt like flipping through a catalog you couldn't read.

We negotiated over Skype chat. How many units? What's the lead time? Can you send samples?

The samples looked good. The price was good. And the napkin math suddenly felt real. We pooled our money—several thousand dollars each, which felt enormous—and placed the order.

Then we waited.

I wish I could tell you about the marketing campaign that almost worked. The big retailer who came this close to saying yes. The clever pivot that saved us.

There is no silver lining.

The shipment arrived, and so did the bill we hadn't anticipated: import taxes. Hundreds of dollars we didn't have.

A large chunk of the lights were defective. Flickering strands. Taped-over wires hiding splices. Loose connections. Dead bulbs.

We'd bought inventory we couldn't sell.

We tried anyway, at least with the strands that worked.

We sold a few to friends and family. The rest became a loss—five or six thousand dollars split between two college kids who didn't have five or six thousand dollars to lose.

Every Christmas, my dad jokes about it.

"Need some lights for the tree? We've got plenty."

He's not wrong. In his basement in Massachusetts, there are still boxes of those LED strands—the ones that survived.

I don't feel regret when he says it. I don't feel shame.

Those few thousand dollars bought me an education no textbook could match. We bungled nearly every step, but nothing actually kept us from trying. And once you learn that, the next try comes a little easier, helped along by a few scars you don't feel the need to earn twice.

So when December rolls around and my dad reaches for the joke, I just smile.