That’s the story he likes to tell and it’s repeated uncritically often enough, but I find it stupendously unlikely to be reality that he converted 5k into 27k playing blackjack of all games. And that that one week was enough to see him through to close 11m at an unspecified future date after having burned 80m getting the company up and running.
I chalk it up more to myth building and would love to see a reporter that dug into that story to know what actually happened.
It's survivor bias. It seems unlikely, but we know FedEx to be a successful company to some reasonable level at this point in time. It stands to reason at some point in the past the company was very close to collapse. If it had collapsed we would never have heard about it.
Why does that in any way tell us anything about the veracity of a vague story with no details? I don’t doubt they were in trouble, just that I doubt that he gambles the last 5k and the extra runway of 1 week somehow got them through to 11M at a later unspecified date. What did they do between that 1 week and the 11M raise? It’s not like they became profitable suddenly and it takes a while to raise 11M and it doesn’t sound like they were just waiting for 1 week for all the wires to come through.
Do you actually believe if paychecks were bouncing, pilots would be paying for fuel with their own money? Myths are kind of cool sometimes but let's stay within the boundaries of reality. I'm sure the blackjack story is highly exaggerated, probably also the story that his professor gave his business plan a failing grade.
Fred Smith taking the company's last $5K to Vegas and luckily winning $27,000.
Mind you at that point, pilots were putting fuel on their personal credit cards, payroll had been bouncing for weeks.
(Funnily, some people here think he did the right thing.)