A lot has changed about starting a business in the last 30 years. Even so, there are plenty of parallels between Fortune’s 1995 article about Courtland “Corky” Logue—a serial entrepreneur from Texas who had then founded or acquired 28 companies—and a profile in the April/May issue of Fortune of the billionaire Marc Lore.
Lore, who is worth an estimated $2.8 billion after selling companies he cofounded to Amazon and Walmart, is now trying to build his food-delivery company Wonder into the “Amazon of food and beverage.” He told Fortune tech correspondent Jason Del Rey that a half-measure of commitment is not nearly enough to get a company off the ground: “When you do this startup thing, you can’t, like, dial it back or do it less,” he said. “You’re eating glass every day, you’re working 100 hours a week, and you’re all in on it. It’s the only way to make it work.”
By disposition, Logue actually enjoyed that pace of work, he explained to Fortune writer Peter Nulty in 1995: “I like living at 100 miles an hour,” he said. “That’s where life is most fun—out on the edge.” Like Lore, who spends 45 minutes at a time gazing at an org chart constructed from sticky notes in his office, Logue made a point of sweating the small stuff, and staying abreast of daily operations at his companies, which had included a chain of upscale pawn shops, EZ Pawn. He advised other entrepreneurs to watch their businesses “like a hawk.” “I go over numbers every day from 4 to 6 P.M.,” Logue told Nulty. “I know entrepreneurs who say they’ll look at the numbers at the end of the year. Never wait till the end of the year, or you’ll learn about trouble too late to act.”
Fortune’s 1995 article recounts how Logue had recently been ousted from EZ, the corporation he founded. He likely didn’t earn billions through his entrepreneurship, but he went on to have what sounds like an enviable life: A 2023 column in the Austin American-Statesman describes him at 75 as “the pied piper of one of the coolest pickleball groupings in an area that’s full of them.”
The group of about 60 friends played regularly on four courts at Logue’s home in Rollingwood, Texas, the article explains, and “Logue is the commissioner of this circle, the happy hour bartender and even the breakfast chef”—titles perhaps even more exalted than that of founder or CEO.