Business wisdom from 72-year-old Tom Persky, owner of floppydisk.com, in an interview with Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar:
On sticking to your principles…
One day somebody contacted me and asked if I wanted to buy the domain for $1,000. I felt it was an outrage. I told my wife I would not participate in this kind of cybercrime, but she took out a cheque-book and got the domain name instantly. This went totally against my principles, but thankfully my wife is much smarter than I am.
On getting out of a dying industry…
Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
On skating to where the puck is going…
In the beginning, I figured we would do floppy disks, but never CDs. Eventually, we got into CDs and I said we’d never do DVDs. A couple of years went by and I started duplicating DVDs. Now I’m also duplicating USB drives. You can see from this conversation that I’m not exactly a person with great vision.
On the future of the floppy disk:
There’s this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: “Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.” The floppy disks will be an icon forever.