Alan Wolan

Ballsy™ Entrepreneur with a Passion for Life

Alan Wolan is the founder, CEO, Chairman of the Board and sole employee of The Ballsy Award™.

Alan was born 1962 in Coney Island, Brooklyn. He attended various public schools in Brooklyn, then later in Queens, the names and PS numbers of which he can no longer remember.

After attending Forest Hills High School and graduating 28th in his class, he attended the University of Pennsylvania after his father agreed to pony up $20,000 a year in tuition.

Alan began his college education as a pre-med student, eagerly following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps, both of whom were doctors. His desire to become a doctor was easily cured by working as a summer intern at the Mount Sinai hospital in New York where he realized that hospitals were depressing places.

He switched his major to Intellectual History, read a bunch of books and smoked a bunch of pot. He was an enthusiastic student, which is the only explanation of why he graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa.

After graduating he wanted to move to California and become a school teacher. His mother remarked that he only wanted to do this because he was afraid of entering the business world.

Realizing this was true, he instead accepted a position as analyst at a real estate investment firm in Manhattan. This job was offered him as a favor to his mother, who knew the owner of the firm.

In this job he was forced by his colleagues to wear suits with bow ties and suspenders, smoke cigars and otherwise look and act like a pompous ass. While working there, he attended NYU Business School for his MBA degree, only doing this because the firm offered to pay the entire tuition.

After getting his MBA he quit the investment firm (suckers!) and got a job as a Junior Account Executive at a New York Advertising Agency. There he spent long hours trying to figure out ways to get people to switch their brand of nasal spray and cough syrup, even though all brands are exactly the same.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Alan decided to quit his cushy $42,000 a year job at the ad agency and move to Berlin to open a T-Shirt shop at Checkpoint Charlie selling silk screened wall graffiti t-shirts to American tourists. For this he should have won the Ballsy Award™ but the award did not exist at the time.

After selling thousands of poor quality t-shirts to unsuspecting backpackers, he decided to open Germany's first American hot dog shop, aptly named Mr. Hot Dog. The shop was a great success at first but then a failure because after everyone tried one of his hot dogs once, they never came back.

It was in Germany that Alan discovered Free Postcard Advertising, which he at first thought was a sucky idea, but then changed his mind. Not the first time that Alan has been wrong, definitely not the last either. He sold all his worldly possessions in Germany, pulled together a whopping 15,000 Deutchmarks and returned to New York determined to start America's first postcard advertising company, which later became GoCARD, the largest free postcard company in the world, but surely not the best.

After getting lucky with GoCARD, Alan decided to start GoGORILLA Media, which is an advertising company based on the idea of ballsy advertising.

Several years later, Alan decided to go into the Urban Blight business by founding GoPOSTER, a company which plasters advertising posters all over the damn place.

Over the years Alan realized that his chief talent in life is getting an idea into his head and stopping at nothing until that idea has been realized. Not successful, just realized.

So that's why he invented The Ballsy Award™: to honor people who get ideas into their heads, completely ignore the sound opinions of their friends, and do it anyway.

So when everyone is saying "That'll never work", that's when the Ballsy among us keep plowing ahead, unintimidated by the prospects of failure and ridicule.

Currently, Alan lives with his girlfriend and 7 year old son on the pretentiously hip lower eastside of Manhattan.