Archive for June, 2009
June 29, 2009
I don’t usually know if I’ve made the right decision (business, personal, kids, etc.) until after I’ve made it. And then even after making it, I sometimes wonder if it was the right one. But usually I feel a huge sense of relief for some time until, of course, the details have to be worked out. But life is a series of decisions. Some are small ones like when to do the laundry, what clothes to wear, what to eat for dinner, etc. Some are big ones like what house to buy, whether to sell your company, who to marry, whether to have kids or not, how many kids to have, where to send those kids to school, where to go on vacation, what job to take, etc. But I guess whether a decision is big or small depends on who you are and where you are. Looking back, when I ignored my gut instinct the outcome was not so great. When I voiced my opinion, knowing I was right, and was ignored only to prove myself right, I was vindicated but still it sucked.
I think we often let others make decisions for us in business and in life. I know I’ve done this several times in business as a young entrepreneur. We think other, older, experienced people know more, but sometimes they just don’t because they can’t see the things you see. Sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. We might politely express our opinions but not push hard for what we really want for fear of something happening (e.g., not being accepted, looking bad, not being validated, hurting other people, feeling like we don’t deserve what we want, or our outstanding innate power). Yes, I do think many of us are afraid of our power and being our true selves.
But then we wake up one day to realize we are living a life and business decided by others and not ourselves. I know many a mother who finds herself in that position in her life…living a life that someone else (family, society, job) dictated to her and she passively accepts it. I know a few fathers who feel that way too. I know far more business people who wished they had spoken up and made different decisions. In the world of entrepreneurship, we call those learning experiences scar tissue! A necessary rite of passage to prove yourself.
I’ve learned that knowing your boundaries up front helps you make better decisions even in times of crisis or joy. For instance, if you know you will never lie, cheat, or steal then your decisions of course are going to be different than a thief who doesn’t have those boundaries. But if you are not careful, you can end up like that proverbial frog in slow heating water who doesn’t realize he is in danger until it’s far too late and he’s boiled to death (e.g., Enron and other financial scandals that involved otherwise good people). I think most of us make the decision to jump out, turn the temperature down, ask for help, or change the rules of the game of the pot we’re in and earn our scar tissue and badges of experience in the process.
Making a decision to do something, accept something, not do something, or not accept something can leave you with images of the road not taken. Not following your gut instinct, can leave you with many more decisions to make that might have been avoided or replaced with other decisions…not to mention heartburn and anxiety.
Oh, if we only could get away with not making any decisions and end up being rich, happy, healthy, and fulfilled… 
I wonder if someone has invented a pill for that?
June 28, 2009
The entrepreneurial journey is full of interesting twists and turns. Even the most successful entrepreneurs I know struggle with what success means. I was recently meeting with a two time successful (multi-million dollar exits) entrepreneur, and he said after a few months we’re all back to our miserable selves and looking for the next thing to do. It’s funny how many people I interviewed for the Success Profiles sort of said the same thing. They would achieve or fail in one thing and then it was on to the next with something to prove.
Are we ever content? I’m not sure if it’s an entrepreneurial trait, a mid-life characteristic, an MBA grad fate, or something else. But as I continue to tweet about and reach out to my contacts about finding a good home for Babble Soft, I find myself turning to music as I have often done in the past during times of transition. There’s something about music that pulls out the emotions in me and lets me process them in a way that can’t be processed in silence or even with close friends.
Since I started taking yoga last year, I’ve seen the benefits of certain meditation and quiet times but music – the combination of words and instruments – pushes buttons in me that make it OK to to feel things that intellectually my mind tells me not to feel. The mind just says focus on this task, get it done, and move on. The mind doesn’t want to be bothered with stuff that affects the heart and soul. Music reminds me that to be human is to feel because other humans are singing about their life transitions and it reminds me how kind of normal some of these feelings are. And sometimes we need to give ourselves the space to feel and really listen to what our body is telling us instead of just our minds to make the best decisions. Instead of feeling isolated in silence or the sometimes deafening noise of two kids incessant chatter, music brings me softly into the river of humanity.
So some of the music I’ve been listening to lately is by Billy Joel (hence the title of this post), Indigo Girls, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson (mostly because of his recent death), Sarah McLachlan, and oddly enough Book of Love.
May the music be with you…
June 25, 2009
I debated whether to write this post tonight since it’s late and I’m kind of tired after a long day of telling people about finding a new home for Babble Soft. I still have many more people and twitter friends to tell.
It was a weird, weird day for me today. I was extra sensitive with many things happening at once. I came home after hanging out with a girlfriend of mine to find out Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett had both died today – June 25, 2009.
I’m not sure yet if I’m ashamed to admit this or not, but I was a BIG Michael Jackson fan. I even had his Off The Wall and Thriller albums in vinyl (yes I’m that old). I loved his songs and even had his poster on my teenage wall. I would buy every magazine I could find with him on it and even wrote him a fan letter. I guess I had a teenage crush on him but that was when he looked somewhat normal and before he did a bunch of inappropriate things with kids. He was so talented and it’s a shame he became so weird and reclusive.
His childhood was stolen from him and was it worth the price? I guess his adoring fans think so. I think having all that attention at such a young age gives one a false sense of reality. Having an abusive father didn’t help either.
Some of my favorite songs of his are: (Michael Jackson song lyrics)
She’s Out Of My Life – I would cry every time I heard that song
Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough
Rock With You
The Girl Is Mine – with Paul McCartney
Billie Jean – loved that beat!
Human Nature – one of my all time favorites at the emotions this one evokes
Remember The Time
After those albums, I kind of lost track. But I think many of us remember The Jackson 5 and little Michael singing “ABC-123.”
Yes, he was a big part of my short teenage life and had an affect on me and the world that will live on for a long time.
Posted by Aruni
9:41 pm •
random stuff •
June 22, 2009
This is a hard post for me to write, but there are times in life when the best way to handle hard things is to just deal with it head on. I had some time and space to reflect during my recent beach vacation.
Babble Soft, an idea that I started tinkering around with after my first baby was born in 2003 (our first beta web app release was in 2007 and iPhone app in 2009), has reached a point where my partner, Nicole Johnson, and I can’t do it justice and build it to the company it could be. We just don’t have the monetary and time resources that a consumer web and mobile (iPhone) based product Baby Insights and Baby Say Cheese require to become a household name. I’ve been working on Babble Soft part time while balancing kids, the house, etc. for most of the company’s life. I spent a few months full time on it just before I took a day job about a year ago and now the time has come to find a new home for it. Nicole has been working on this part time, after hours, as well.
We are both discovering that Building A Web Business After Hours is hard to do with two small kids around. And doubly hard when two ventures are trying to get off the ground in one household: my husband is starting the pre-K to 2nd grade Magellan School that’s scheduled to open this Fall and our resources are also being tied up with that and our kids will be attending the school.
Nicole and I both believe in web applications to help make parents of newborn’s lives easier, and we want to find a good home for Babble Soft with someone who can take our vision to the next level. We will continue to support our existing customers and any future customers so please don’t worry about that. We have a high bar set for customer service! We just can’t take it to the level (with all the exciting new applications we have planned) where we know it could be right now in our lives, but we know there is someone or some company who can.
If you know of someone who might be interested, please email me at blogger(at) babblesoft(dot)com to discuss further. Please pass a link to this post to everyone you know!
Motherhood is not always peaches & cream and being a mom entrepreneur adds a little extra challenge to the process so sometimes it’s the hard calls that can make the difference in a company’s and person’s success.
Thanks to all of you readers for your continued support and sticking with me through my unusual parenting and entrepreneurial journeys!
Aruni Gunasegaram
President/Founder
(512) 961-6002
Nicole Johnson
VP Product Development
(512) 961-6002
June 21, 2009
The kids and I just got back from a fabulous beach vacation in South Padre, TX with some friends of mine. This was the first time I had ever been to a Texas beach and I’ve lived in Texas for a very, very long time. It was a really nice beach…certainly not better than the beaches I’ve seen in Cancun or Cozumel but perfect nonetheless for this week long trip.
We had a blast! We even made it to the small Schlitterbahn park there. I’ve mentioned Sandy Blanchard in several of my posts in the past. She’s the one that takes those fabulous nature/flower pictures that I use in my posts sometimes. To the left is a picture of our feet in the sand. 
They also have two kids and our kids had a great time playing together. I’ve known them for almost 18 years now and there’s something about hanging out with people who know you, that makes things so easy. You can mostly be who you are and we can all laugh about ‘way back when’ before kids. I met Sandy’s husband, Jay, at a company we interned at back in the summer between our junior and senior years in college. They were high school sweethearts and still dating at the time. I remember laughing a lot with that group of interns and Jay always tried to pull one over on me with his ‘underwear sticking to walls’ apartment mess, but I got him good a time or two. Plus he reminded me he had to help me take my car to get fixed about 5 times that summer. It was a used car my dad had given me that turned out to be a lemon and turned me off of ever buying a Volkswagen. Sandy chaperoned us when I beat him at a drinking game at Bennigan’s restaurant (he’ll deny this one) and at a jalapeno eating game in another restaurant in front of his parents and my mom (he doesn’t deny this one).
On this trip, he and the boys were driving in one car and Sandy and I and the girls were in another. As we were pulling up to border patrol on our way back, he all of a sudden gets on the walkie talkie and starts saying things like “Aruni, make sure you throw that weed out the window right now. You don’t want to get caught.“ I laughed and said something like “Oh no. I’m throwing it out the back window right now and you better hope they aren’t tapping into this wireless channel or we’ll all go to jail.“ Fortunately, they weren’t tapping the lines, but they did ask us if we were US citizens and I had to tell them I wasn’t born in the US but I was a naturalized citizen, and that the crazy dude behind us had my son in his car. Of course Jay told me later he told the patrol guy he had no idea who we were. Then because we were laughing at our narrow escape, I had to play “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith and blast it through the walkie talkie so he could hear it. The walkie talkies on occasion made us sound like the teachers did on Charlie Brown and Jay would go around saying “wah, wogh, wao”…guess you just had to have been there. 
But back to the ocean, there is just something about the sound and motion of the waves that help put things in perspective. Seeing all the seashells and grains of sand reminded me of how we live in a blip of time and in a hundred years most of us will have been forgotten. Yet we stress and live like everything is so important when most big things in life are out of our control except for those things that are. We make choices every day and we choose whether or not to live a mediocre life and as Seth Godin, my favorite entrepreneurial, marketing blogger just posted:
Along the way, we settle.
We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn’t our best look, or a job that doesn’t quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don’t give us joy, or a website that’s, “good enough.”
The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.
You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.
Posted by Aruni
4:06 pm •
parenting •
June 8, 2009
It’s been almost a week since I last posted. And yes, I hate doing the ‘posting will be light’ post since it’s so ‘been there done that,’ but while I sort through a bunch of varied things and go on a much needed vacation sometime in the next few weeks, posting will, in fact, be light.
So until the next unpredictably timed post, please enjoy this photo taken and image created by my good friend, Sandy Blanchard (click this link to check out her cool photography site). She sent it to me in email back in April 2009 with the subject ‘you are special’ and a note that said “A little something for you” and it made my day! I was touched, honored and reminded of what great friends I have been blessed with.
Posted by Aruni
8:37 pm •
random stuff •
June 2, 2009
I have about 10 things I’m working on or should be working on from home stuff, bill stuff, to work stuff, to life stuff, to kid stuff, to sanity stuff and I’ve been just a wee bit scattered lately.
I have an ‘in progress’ post on books that’s been ‘in progress’ for a few weeks now, but I end up staring at it and not being motivated to finish it so I exercise my ADD traits and move to something else to stare at for a while. I’m going to create another page on this blog eventually with links to the books I’ve read in the past that I highly recommend and maybe some of my current ‘in progress’ books. I’ve got half finished poems, half finished song lyrics, and 1/4 finished books floating around in my computer, in my head, and on my nightstand.
So in order to distract myself further, I eat chocolate covered raisins from Costco (link to a picture of some random guy holding a tub of them). It’s a big tub and it’s almost finished! They are delicious and partially nutritious. I like most things covered in chocolate…
I will have to hold myself back from buying another tub the next time I venture to CostCo…I’ll just distract myself with the wine collection.
Posted by Aruni
8:17 pm •
random stuff •
