A friend gave me a link to some inspiring stories of successful entrepreneurs and I stumble upon this one one particular story. Here’s some excerps from the article- you may read the whole story here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html

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And the Money Comes Rolling In

Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. How does he do it? He keeps things simple.

He looks down at his desk. There’s a $180,000 order waiting for his signature. It’s from VideoEgg, a San Francisco company that is paying Frind to run a series of Budweiser commercials in Canada. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind. He hadn’t even heard of VideoEgg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers’ attention when you are serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month.

Amazingly, Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. “I usually accomplish everything in the first hour,” he says, before pausing for a moment to think this over. “Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes.”

To demonstrate, Frind turns to his computer and begins fiddling with a free software program that he uses to manage his advertising inventory. While he is doing this, he carps about Canada’s high income-tax rate, a serious problem considering that Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, “All done.”

All done? Are you serious? “The site pretty much runs itself,” he explains. “Most of the time, I just sit on my ass and watch it.” There’s so little to do that he and his girlfriend, Annie Kanciar, spent the better part of last summer sunning themselves on the French Riviera. Frind would log on at night, spend a minute or two making sure there were no serious error messages, and then go back to sipping expensive wine. A year ago, they relaxed for a couple of weeks in Mexico with a yacht, a captain, and four of Kanciar’s friends. “Me and five girls,” he says. “Rough life.”

It’s a 21st-century fairy tale: A young man starts a website in his spare time. This person is unknown and undistinguished. He hasn’t gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter, yet he is deceptively brilliant. He has been bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. In most stories, this is where the hard work begins — the long hours, sleepless nights, and near-death business experiences. But this one is way more mellow. Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year.

Frind, 30, doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow who would run a market-leading anything. Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people and who seems to take up less space than his large frame would suggest. Those who know Frind describe him as introverted, smart, and a little awkward. “Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face,” says Noel Biderman, the co-founder of Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based company that owns several dating sites.

see the whole story at http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html