Ok, I lied.  I don’t really hate you, Alex Tew.

For those who don’t know, Alex Tew is the 21 year-old student from England who, while contemplating how to raise some money to help pay for school and also buy some new socks, conceived of the Million Dollar Homepage.  The idea: make a webpage divided up into a grid of one million small boxes and then sell each one of those boxes for one dollar each.  The new owner of the box may place a picture and/or link in each little piece of virtual real estate.

In about four months Mr. Tew has sold all one million of these little boxes.  Allow me to repeat: HE HAS SOLD ALL ONE MILLION.

His webpage became such a phenomenon that he auctioned off the last one thousand boxes on EBay and they sold for over thirty thousand dollars.

It’s a powerful lesson on the value of a good idea and a little ingenuity, and a reminder that work imparted and money earned do not have a linear relationship.

In truth, I don’t hate Alex Tew at all — I admire him, and if there’s anyone I hate, it’s me.  Not because I didn’t think up the idea of a million dollar homepage first, but rather because in my 27 years to date, the best idea I’ve come up with has me working on a clock every day and cherishing two weeks of vacation time every year.