As a teenager, Patrick Byrne learned the meaning of the term overstock while buying and selling Christmas trees. Later, he discovered the potential of a network on the fringes of retail, selling companies’ overstock in small quantities. He scoured Silicon Valley for potential investors to no avail. Undaunted, he self-funded with the help of family and friends. By 2001, the company had liquidated the inventory of 18 dot-com companies that received funding from those same Silicon Valley investors. Byrne took the company public the following year. Overstock.com has since grown from a small start-up that offered fewer than 100 products into one of the country’s most frequently visited shopping sites.