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Altucher was New Jersey junior state chess champion in 1986 Randy Harris for Bloomberg Businessweek
Shaggy-haired, bespectacled James Altucher is a 43-year-old venture capitalist who puts money into tech startups such as Buddy Media—last valued at $500 million. He has also designed websites, worked as a financial columnist, and run a fund that invested in hedge funds. Along the way, he lost his savings and his marriage, and by his own admission suffered several nervous breakdowns.
Now Altucher has turned his misfortune into a source of wisdom and comfort for the despondent. He shares his insecurities and psychic traumas with 30,000 Twitter followers and on his blog, the Altucher Confidential, which he says has had 10 million page views since he launched it a year ago. His self-published book, I Was Blind But Now I See, has ranked as high as No. 2 this year in Amazon.com’s motivational books category, and he’s publishing a comic book about his life. “I think the role James fulfills in the post-crash world is beacon of hope,” says Joshua Brown, a financial adviser who blogs as the Reformed Broker. “I know it sounds corny, but no one has been more forthcoming about how the torn economic fabric of this country has affected him personally. The message is always centered around him still being here—that there’s life after financial near-death.”
While blogging is his passion, Altucher makes his living investing in tech startups as founder and managing partner of Formula Capital in New York. “The guy is too complicated to analyze, and I’m not a psychologist, but he knows his stuff,” says John Pappajohn, a biotech investor in Des Moines who helped found Caremark (now CVS/Caremark ) and seeks Altucher’s insight on companies and the markets. “I don’t go to New York without asking him to breakfast.”
On a November morning, Altucher digs into pancakes at a diner near New York’s Grand Central Terminal, having just blogged from a FedEx Office/Kinko’s. “A year ago I had a revelation,” he says. “I’ve failed time and again, hurt myself and others, woke up angry and scared at three every morning. I needed to open up and share.” In October 2010, Altucher started posting confessions on everything from business failure and sex to death and depression. Example: “I was completely lost, four years old, running around the department store looking for my parents who I was afraid had abandoned me. … I’m still wondering why they were thinking of entering the elevator without me.”
Shortly after launching his blog, Altucher learned that the top search query bringing readers to the site was “I want to die.” He realized that the Altucher Confidential had become much more than an exercise in self-exploration. “There is such a deep need out there to know you are not struggling alone,” he says. In one August post he wrote about the times he had pondered ending it all and how he managed to persevere. The essay prompted an outpouring of gratitude from grieving parents, laid-off breadwinners, and battered women. “I was just really f***ing sick of letting a man hit me,” wrote one reader. “So I left. And the fear I was living with died.”
Altucher’s path to this unlikely role dates to the mid-1990s, when the computer programmer launched a startup to build websites for media companies. In 1996 he successfully pitched HBO on III: am, a Web series that had him wandering the streets of Manhattan late Tuesday nights to see what people were doing at that hour. “Altucher’s conversation with an Eighth Avenue transvestite prostitute brings out the desperation and loneliness of those who don’t (or can’t) fall asleep with the rest of us,” wrote a reviewer in Newsweek.
