Put down your investor presentation deck, and cancel your meetings with Silicon Valley venture capital firms. “These days, entrepreneurs are focused on raising money and getting big, but there are a lot of solid business ideas out there that don’t require a gazillion dollars to operate,” says Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, an online marketplace for photography gear, and producer of a photo-focused newsletter. “I suggest people be a little more open-minded about the business in front of them and see if they can do it on their own.”
Gupta walks the walk. He’s never taken a dime of outside money. Even more impressive is his ability to build several companies while facing the biggest challenge of his life: surviving acute leukemia.
An Early Break
Gupta grew up on the East Coast and fell in love with computers at a young age. During his sophomore year at Amherst College, he started The Daily Jolt, a student-run online portal that spread to 100 campuses across the country. It was 2000, and tech was hot. He quit school to focus on the site full time. “But then the bubble burst and we couldn’t raise round two,” he says.
Gupta went back to school, graduated and bought a ticket to Hawaii. He planned to live there and decide his next steps later. “But then my mom got breast cancer, so I decided to stay home in Connecticut and help her,” he says.
Home while his mother recovered, Gupta read Seth Godin’s book Unleashing the Ideavirus and began following his blog religiously. When Godin posted that he needed an intern in New York City, Gupta applied for the job and got it. By 2006, he had started consulting for other companies, moved to San Francisco and was working on a few side projects for fun.
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One of his side projects was Jelly, a co-working space set up in his apartment where friends would visit and work together once a week. Photojojo was another project—one that showed even more promise. “I saw companies like DailyCandy that had started newsletters and were able to monetize them,” he says. “I liked photography, so I thought I’d give it a try and add a few things people could buy on the site for extra revenue.”
The idea took off and before long, Gupta had interns packing boxes of merchandise and lining up at the 24-hour post office at all hours of night.
The Ultimate Challenge
As the site grew steadily, in September 2011, Gupta was hit with the shock of his life: He was diagnosed with acute leukemia. If he didn’t get treatment immediately, his doctor told him that he could die in a matter of weeks. “Within seven hours of getting my diagnosis, I was on a plane home to the East Coast and didn’t come back to my business for one year,” Gupta says.
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The next step was to find a bone marrow donor. As Gupta puts it, “You could look through a group of 20,000 people and still not find the right match.”
Gupta reached out to his friends for help, and they held nearly 100 donor drives across the globe, posting on every online portal. In February 2012, Gupta was linked with a donor and underwent a transplant. He spent the next year recovering at home and just recently came back to San Francisco to work full time on Photojojo.
Staying Positive
Gupta is thrilled to be back at the helm of his company in San Francisco and says business didn’t lag during his absence, thanks to his “incredible team.” Today, Gupta leads nine full-timers and nine freelancers at Photojojo headquarters.
Of course, everyday tasks are not as easy for Gupta as they once were, and he struggles to maintain high levels of energy while taking multiple medications.
But he stays extremely postitive. “I try to surround myself with positive people, and notice that energy tends to create energy,” he says. “I also try to remember that I am extremely lucky."
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Katie Morell is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. She regularly contributes to Hemispheres, USA Today, Consumers Digest, Destination Weddings & Honeymoons, Crain’s Chicago Business and others.
Photos from top: Photojojo, Keegan Jones