Archive for the 'entrepreneur' Category
May 25, 2009
Everyone has heard the word passion. It’s written about in business books, in fiction books, in poems, in romance novels, etc.. It’s shown on TV and in the movies when people find their true loves or their calling in life. But what is it? In the world of entrepreneurship, people tell you in order to be successful you must be passionate about what you are doing. I’ve run into a lot of people who appear passionate about what they are doing but they don’t always succeed in the way they expected. Passion ebbs and flows in most everything in life. Sometimes you are in love with your business and sometimes you aren’t, but in order to survive like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, etc. the passion must be there, the underlying love for your products, people, and company must be there and the gaps between must not be long.
They say true passion can be traced back to childhood, when everything seemed possible. My son is passionate about soccer and hanging out with his good buddies. If it was up to him, he’d be kicking around a soccer ball all day long. I often have to tell him not to kick the soccer ball in the main part of the house. If we’d let him, he’d probably sleep with his soccer ball. If you mention one of his friend’s names, he will incessantly ask us when we are going to see him next. He’s a bit of a socialite like his mom.
I can’t tell what my daughter is passionate about yet, but I think she has an affinity for music and lip gloss. We have a keyboard in our house that my father gave us and she tends to gravitate to it and punch the keys from time to time. And she likes to play the bowling game on the Wii.
My husband is passionate about starting the multi-lingual, international Magellan School here in Austin. He is passionate about his kids learning Spanish since he is fluent in Spanish and wants them to have the gift of multiple languages that was given to him. He is also passionate about biking and exercising. He set a goal to do the Shiner Bash - 100 mile ride and he did it. He exercises every day and he says he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life.
What a blessing it must be to discover your passion and find yourself being able to realize your goals. It’s even better when you can make a living at it. It seems like most people can’t turn their passion into making a living for whatever reasons whether it be timing, market acceptance, encouragement, money, health, ability, skills, etc. Many people try to keep their passion alive on the side or after some time, we forget what it was we were passionate about.
Right now in my life, I’m most passionate about my kids. I am passionate about helping people achieve more than they thought they could. When I look back upon my childhood, I remember the passion I had for music. I think my father actually started taking us to piano lessons when I was about 9 years old when we lived in Albuquerque, NM. When we moved to Lubbock, TX , I sought out my own piano teacher who lived nearby and I would walk to her house for lessons. It was hard to find time to practice and hard to find time to continue since it was just me, my mom, and my sister. My grandmother studied piano in Oxford University in England so I must get some of my passion for music from her. Sadly, I can’t play the piano today, but I can sing.
I sang in church and actually did a solo in front of the entire church in my early teens. I sang in high school choir. I sought out my own voice teacher and when I went to college at UT Austin, I took voice courses for two semesters. I knew I was reasonably good, but not great. I never envisioned myself singing in a musical or singing opera so I guess I thought what’s the point and continued on with my business degree. In grad school I sang a few songs in a couple of bands.
I also remembered that I liked to write. In my early teens, a few girlfriends and I would start this notebook with a story and each of us would have to write the next part until we ended up with a full story. I hate to admit this, but I think Michael Jackson and his glove showed up a time or two in those stories. :-) I wonder what happened to those notebooks. I would also invariably get high grades in creativity in my English classes but very low grades in grammar. The concept of grammar didn’t click for me until my freshman English class in college for some reason.
I also didn’t have anyone around me encouraging me, connecting me with people, giving me feedback, or showing me the way to nurture those creative right brain activities I was drawn to. So I did what any respectable child of two doctors would do….I got an Accounting degree and then an MBA, which has served me well and odds are has resulted in a much more lucrative career than if I had pursued writing, singing or horse back riding (another younger days hobby of mine) as a career.
So now here I am in mid-life. Too old to start up regular horse back riding again for fear of breaking my bones…well not really, but not enough time to go to a barn and take care of a horse. It’s highly unlikely that I can make singing a financially rewarding career at this point in my life, but I am enjoying my voice lessons and relish any time I can make it to a jam session. I do enjoy writing in my blog.
So that leaves me to figure out how best to blend my passion for working with people, with a product I’m passionate about, with a path to millions of dollars….
Any suggestions? How did you discover your passion?
May 14, 2009
Last night I attended the first ever Austin Technology Incubator Bioscience Open House! I’ve been extra busy this week since the previous night I also served as a panelist at the TiE Austin Funding Forum.
The open house was a HUGE success with close to 150 people in attendance at the AT&T Conference center located on The University of Texas at Austin campus. The event was held in an outside area and despite the wind, everyone seemed to have a great time.
The event brought together entrepreneurs, VCs, healthcare professionals, and hospital representatives. It was was partly sponsored by Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin.
The open house was the brainchild of our fabulous Bioscience Director, Jessica Hanover, and was pulled off flawlessly by our Marketing Communications/Events guru, Melissa Rabeaux (who I mentioned in a post I did about her work pulling together the Clean Energy Venture Summit late last year) and her intern team: Stephany Puno (@StephanyPuno) and Laura Benold (@lbita).
I was feeling a little anti-social last night for a variety of reasons including information and emotional overload, so I was more than happy to hang with Stephany and Laura eating tortilla chips, 7 layer dip, and mini-hamburgers…oh and drink a couple of glasses of vinto tinto. 
They kept me entertained, and I helped with registering people and even validating parking from time to time. Being near the check in process, I got to meet most everyone who came and went anyway.
I ventured out into the crowd to say ‘hello’ to a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, make some key connections, and to see Jessica speak.
ATI Bioscience is a fairly new program (about a year old) and is definitely building a great foundation to help grow Austin’s Bio community!
May 13, 2009
Last night I participated in annual event put on by TiE Austin called The Funding Forum. I participated last year as a reviewer to help teams prepare for their pitches and as a last minute panelist to review pitches. This year I was a panelist listening to pitches but was kind of a moderator too.
The companies rotate tables and pitch their ideas via their PC or hardcopy PowerPoint slides to a few potential investors. Many angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, and members from the technology startup community are present.
At my table, we had 4 different companies. One of them had already come in to the Austin Technology Incubator to present so I was familiar with them. Two of them had very nice, well thought out presentations and a did a good job presenting their ideas. One of the presenters was not very well prepared.
It’s a great place for new entrepreneurial teams to practice their pitch and get advice from experienced individuals. Some take feedback gracefully and some don’t.
One of the investors at my table had funded a company he met at a prior Funding Forum so it seems to work, on occasion, as it’s designed to!
I left just after the company pitches ended for a variety of reasons, with one of them being that I started to wonder if I was truly in the right space-time continuum.
November 30, 2008
As Thanksgiving 2008 fades into pleasant memories, I came to ponder (as I often do) how a mere thought can rule our hours and days. Most of our thoughts are about our work, our family, our daily obligations, and as we get older maybe about the meaning of our lives.
Some thoughts are fleeting and some are recurring…causing us smiles, tears, pain, joy, or angst. Some recurring thoughts get pushed aside by the ordinariness of our every day lives. Some keep coming back and no matter how hard we try to dismiss them, they seem impossible to get rid of and ironically the pleasant thoughts often flee our minds more quickly than the uncomfortable ones.
For those of us who don’t have the mental strength of mind to ignore/squash/bury our thoughts without being thrown into a state of mental anguish, it can result in frequent bouts of disequilibrium. Those of us who seek to quiet the disequilibrium are often labeled as entrepreneurs. It’s not easy being an entrepreneur as we are often trying to solve things that may be unsolvable in our current place in the space-time continuum. Yet still we try.
I and many others have and continue to have these strong thoughts. In the past when I’ve followed those thoughts that surface and don’t leave me alone, I have learned from them, been able to help others, and barely lived to tell the tale.
“Life is about learning.” That in itself is a profound and already well worn thought carved in the minds of sages, prophets, and philosophers who came long before us. Yet each time that thought surfaces, I fear it. I fear what it is foreshadowing and despite having conquered that fear many times before, the differences between each ‘learning’ seem so vast.
So, how do we rule our thoughts instead of our thoughts ruling us? Or maybe the question is can we accomplish this in this lifetime? In this body? In this experience?
Oh what power our thoughts have on the direction we step in our lives…whether it’s right, left, backward, straight, or directly into stardust…into our dreams.
November 20, 2008
I had to talk myself off the entrepreneurial ledge yesterday. Of course there is the often publicized glamour of entrepreneurship and then there is the unsung story of the not so glamorous side. I think most entrepreneurs are a little bit neurotic, myself included, so when I heard that the first company I was founding CEO of officially shut down recently, I entered a state of…well I still haven’t figured out what state that is.
The company was alive for 11 years. For 11 years it provided experience, salaries, products and services to employees and customers. I left in 2001 and my husband, Erin, who was the CTO left in 2003, and we have had nothing to do with the day to day operations since. But the profound affect it has had on me cannot be reduced to mere words. In many ways, it was like my first child (without the diaper changing). It was a difficult parting of ways for me both personally and professionally.
I knew a few good people who were still there and through the years they have reached out to me to help them find another job or share their experiences about working there. Good people came and went. Some bad ones came and went and some bad ones stayed, but overwhelmingly greatness was among us. I heard about the company shutting down a few weeks ago but just mentioned it to a group of college friends on an email group I’ve been a part of since 1995 (pre-social networking sites for people who love mushrooms, pre-blogging, pre-twitter). I had convinced one of the guy’s in the group to join us for the journey and he replied by saying this:
Aruni - I know I’ve poked at you and Isochron since I left but I have to say it was the best business class I could have taken. This piece of Oil Field Trash was polished quite a bit while in Austin. I do want to thank you and Erin for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it. From that trial I learned sooooo much. I’m not sure I ever put it together sufficiently for you guys to know what the experience meant for me. Thanks! You and Erin were a rock I could depend on during my time in Austin as well. It meant a lot.
When I read his note on my phone before going in to an invitation only IBM Women Entrepreneur’s Webcast event held at IBM, the flood gates cracked a little. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot so I had to pull myself together and go in. The rest of the day I was on edge and I still am.
I had to walk into my day job after the IBM Webcast and deal with bureaucracy, with people wanting 5 approvals to get something done, with collections, with employee allocations, and with being extremely underpaid because I’m doing much more than I was hired to do. I had to suspend reality to make it through the day. I repeated to myself “floodgates don’t open at work” over and over. If I was a man and punched the wall, it would be more acceptable. I had a “What am I doing with my life?” moment. I had a “I’m working for ‘the man,’ I have two kids, I’ve been married for 7 years, we have a house and car payment, I have to keep our insurance benefits, our savings have sunk due to the crazy economic situation, and I feel trapped” moment.
I had already committed to guest lecture at an executive MBA class yesterday evening so I went in not knowing what would come out of my mouth. I shared the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and received several questions about Babble Soft and my day job. I was surprised at how calm I felt giving my talk given the emotional roller coaster I had been riding all day. One of the students took my card and said he wanted to see if he could help me get introduced to someone for a possible opportunity for Babble Soft.
I also happened to receive an email through facebook from one of my former students (I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin) who happens to be expecting a baby. He sent me a link to a new book by Randy Komisar who wrote The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living
(a book I made required reading in my class) called This I Believe. Komisar writes about the Deferred Life Plan and how we make excuses about not doing what we want to do and putting off things until the time is right.
So despite all of that, I talked myself off the entrepreneurial ledge because I live in the real world. The real world is where I have two beautiful children who smile and laugh. A world where I tell my son after he ate a big dinner tonight that he was a ‘hungry hippo’ and he immediately replies and says in a comedian (trying to make his voice sound deep) tone “There’s a Hungry Hippo in the House!“ My daughter laughs, and I look at him with a smile on my face and know instantly he got his sense of humor from me. 
[Hippo photo by my friend Sandy Blanchard]
So I take solace from some words my day job boss told me the other day. When I asked him why he wanted to hire me he said ‘because he heard I was a natural entrepreneur and he wanted one on staff.’ When I thought about those words later in the day, my soul said ‘thank you grandpa’ because he is who I gained my natural entrepreneurial tendencies from…I just happen to be a woman girl.
I hope both my children will be able to express themselves throughout their lives in ways I was never able to in the past but aspire to in the future.
November 16, 2008
The following is a guest post by a friend and fellow entrepreneur Julie Fergerson. We met several years ago while each of us was in the middle of our very own first high tech start-up. Julie is currently a VP at Debix. Debix provides services to help you monitor your credit. My husband and I signed up a while ago, and we recently signed up our kids. We were at her daughter’s 5 year old birthday party that she mentions below. We just got the results back for our kids who were part of a batch of 83 kids that were evaluated. Thank goodness our kids are safe but 3 of those kids had compromised credit. Check out Julie’s post below to learn more about how to protect your children’s identities.
Are Your Children’s Identities Safe?
Hi, my name is Julie and I am a mother of two little kids, age 2 and 5. I am also an executive at Debix, the Identity Protection Network, and have been chasing criminals and stopping fraud over the past decade. Recently, I helped design a new product to protect children’s identities. As usual with any new product launch (July 28th, 2008), I asked my friends at my daughter’s fifth birthday party to enroll and give me feedback on what they thought.
I was stunned to find that two of the fourteen children at the party (age 4 and age 9) had someone else using their identities. This hit so close to home that I decided to research the size of the problem.
So we scanned 500 children who were under the age of 18, and found that 1 in 20 kids (5%) already have someone else using their social security number. To put that in perspective, that means about one kid in every classroom in the US is a victim of identity theft. Worse yet, the average child victim had over $12,000 in debt and 12% of the child victims are age 5 and younger - shocking!
To ensure the results were accurate we hired Javelin Strategy and Research, a top-tier analyst firm to analyze the results and report their conclusions. You can download the research report here: www.debix.com/research.
You can hear stories from the parents about their children being victims at (http://news.debix.com/index.php/categories/child-victims/).
As I talk about this problem with other Moms, the first question is always, “what does it mean that their kid is a victim of identity theft?” It means the child will not be able to use his credit when he needs it for things as important as college loans, first apartments or even a first job. As part of my research I met Lindsey, a college student at Texas State, who is living this problem. When she applied for her first internship competing against 400 other candidates, she was thrilled when she got the job and received the company welcome gift. Unfortunately a few weeks later, she received a letter rescinding her job offer - she was told she was not hirable because someone else was using her social security number. After what she calls “a full time job” of working to clear her name for six months, she was able to restore her identity and get the job.
The next question I get is “how can this happen? Surely companies know the social security number belongs to a kid.” The answer is no. There is no system in place to warn companies and the Social Security Administration does not publish a database of social security numbers with names and ages of kids. The social security administration has a formula for issuing a social security number, but you can’t tell the difference between a number that was issued to a 39 year old immigrant to the US and a newborn. About all you can tell from the number is the year and location it was issued (check out SSA Algorithm for issuing SSNs.)
It is our job as parents to protect our children and give them every possible advantage when they become an adult. We have to protect our kids as best we can so when they start out they have a clean record and aren’t starting adult life at a disadvantage.
The solution I built at Debix finds the problems and restores the child’s identity for $20 per year. While we try to keep our pricing affordable, we also took the time to publish the steps a parent would need to do if they wanted to protect their kids on their own at www.childrenscreditcrisis.org.
I also worked with the FBI to produce a webcast to teach parents how to protect their kids from Identity Theft. Feel free to pass this information along.
*******
Do you have any stories to share about identity theft either from personal experience or a friend’s?
November 8, 2008
I never thought I’d be that excited about a printer, but here I am writing about one. The main reason it’s so exciting to write about this one is because I got it free! That’s like getting $350 (including ink) of stuff you can really use!
I bet you are wondering why I got it free. Well it’s because I (@aruni) and Barbara Jones are both on twitter. Barbara runs a company called One2One Network - The Women’s Word of Mouth Marketing Network and she discovered me on twitter and began following me a while back.
OK, it’s not just because I’m on twitter, but part of getting lucky is being somewhere where people are looking for people like you. So she probably thought since I write reasonably well in English and my blog is read by many entrepreneurially minded women, men, moms, and dads, that my experience with the printer might provide an interesting perspective.
When she first asked me if I’d like an Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer, I tweeted back something like “heck yeah!” I then told my husband and he being the one that manages our home IT set-up as well as being our resident rocket scientist, was immediately skeptical. First he grumbled “Well, what’s wrong with our current HP Photosmart 3210 All-in-One” that we’ve had for a few years. The only response I could meekly muster was that the scanning feature didn’t work well. He then asked if it was network ready (not just wireless…it had to be able to be plugged into with an Ethernet connection). He also said it had to be Mac compatible. Of course Barbara cheerfully tweeted it met all of those requirements. She was probably wondering why I was looking a gift horse in the mouth or at minimum what kind of man I was married to.
When it arrived and he opened the box, he took one look at the design and features and cracked a half smile (a rare occurrence when it comes to technical items - unless it’s a new Mac, Blackberry, or other Apple product) and said “You did good.” I nodded knowingly thinking to myself ‘don’t I always!‘
He set it up and the last few weeks we’ve been using it for a variety of things from printing work related stuff, to kid’s birthday cards, maps, to scanning documents. I have to say I’m impressed and here are the top 5 reasons why:
- My husband was impressed making it easier to get it installed and tested!
- It has a document feeder just like a copier. This is such a *HUGE* feature for scanning or copying multiple pages. I no longer have to put one page down, open the lid, put another page down, etc. I just set the pages I want to scan or copy on the top and press a few buttons. It also scans to .pdf which I love!
- It’s Mac compatible (see also item #1 above)
- It’s WiFi and Ethernet ready (see also item #1 above) [Interesting side note: the Wi-Fi Alliance is headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator, which is where I work during the day]
- The design is very cool, modern, and sleek and fits perfectly on top of my little file cabinet. It has a touch screen front interface for one touch copy and scanning.
The only issue I’ve had with it is printing pages with heavy color and that’s probably because we use newspaper cheap paper. A few months ago (for some cheap wad/had a coupon unknown reason) I bought a case of Office Depot premium multipurpose paper and it’s pretty thin. I think I just began printing on it using the HP and now with the deep colors in the Epson, the pages sometimes come out feeling wet. I changed the setting to draft but then it kind of dulls the color. I guess I’ll have to suffer through some wet pages until I finish this case of cheap paper!
So, although inertia (and the economy) might have prevented me from replacing our HP printer, I can honestly say that the ability to scan multiple pages easily would have swung me over to the Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer side of the camp quite some time ago.
So thank you Epson, Barbara, and oh yeah twitter!
November 2, 2008
The title of this post was inspired by a fortune cookie fortune. For those of you who are new readers, I did some posts a while back using fortunes from fortune cookies as blog titles. I thought this one was particularly appropriate given how challenging entrepreneurship can be and given the state of our economy. But here’s the interesting part, the fortune cookie actually read: “Love is like war; easy to begin but hard to stop.”
I felt myself nodding knowingly inside when I read it. How true it is in relation to both Love and Business. How relatively easy it can be to start a business or fall in love. We tell ourselves, it’s just an idea/romantic feeling…let’s see where it goes. One thing after another happens and if you don’t chicken out (or the playing field of potential significant others or stable jobs doesn’t pull you away), you find yourself:
| Business |
Love |
| |
|
| Exploring ideas |
Dating |
| Incorporating your business |
Being in a committed relationship |
| Raising funds |
Getting engaged |
| Hiring people |
Getting married |
| Raising more funds |
Buying a house |
| Releasing new products |
Having kids |
| Hiring more people |
Hiring domestic help or losing your mind |
| Taking longer to break even |
Taking longer to adjust to life with kids |
| Laying off people |
Hiring a marriage counselor |
| Feeling an air of desperation |
Experiencing a mid-life crisis |
| Closing up shop or going bankrupt |
Getting a divorce |
| Becoming profitable and self sustaining |
Living happily ever after! |
No one goes into business or marriage believing that one day it might ‘stop’ or end. Yet, 80 to 90% of the time businesses (e.g., technology start-ups, restaurants, retail shops, side businesses) fail or barely break even, and last I heard 50 to 60% of marriages end in divorce and that rate has been increasing over the years. So much so that venture capitalists are actually funding sites like Divorce360.com and Agreed Divorces.com. They should also fund a site called ShutDownYourBusiness.com!
Stopping a business or a marriage is not easy. You get up every day and say to yourself: “Something will happen to make the business work. I’ll get funding. I’ll get that next customer. I can’t stop now!“ You coast in your marriage thinking “I’ll keep myself busy and things will get better or make more sense. We’ll make it work for the sake of the kids.“ Many times it does get better (after the sleep deprivation wears off) but sometimes you end up like Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker or other such couples who can’t stand each other but stay together because they don’t know what else to do. Or you end up a bitter, washed up individual who finds yourself going through the motions because you have defined yourself as an entrepreneur yet you could never build a sustaining business. You then end up feeling that life is unfair and you never got your well deserved lucky break.
I know this post might sound depressing, but these are the odds you are playing with when you start a business or marriage. Many entrepreneurs will fold up (and have already started to) their businesses due to tough economic times (no funding, no customers, etc.). They will use the bad economy as a welcome excuse for not making it. It is, after all, a justifiable/less ego-destroying way to explain to people why your business didn’t make it.
And by all means, take the opportunity to wrap things up if you can (for your and your family’s sanity) because it is going to be tougher than normal for a while. However, at the same time, the opportunities (volunteer help, cheaper resources, less competition) for being creative will be abundant.
The next few years are going to be interesting. Companies/marriages may fall apart because the changing economy ends up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or they might outlast the downturn and be stronger on the other side. Many successful entrepreneurs have emerged from down economies and their success is surely a prerequisite for the economy turning around and thriving!
I, for one, am glad to be living in this day and age. In no other time in history (or probably not in any other country) could I have done what I’ve done, tried what I’ve tried, say what I say, write what I write, do what I do, or dream what I dream without being squashed.
What do you think? Is Business and Love like (the US war in Iraq)? Easy to begin but hard to stop?
October 15, 2008
Teach her how to fish, she eats for a lifetime. This year’s Blog Action Day theme is about poverty. When I last checked the site over 10,000 bloggers had signed up to participate reaching over 11 million readers worldwide. Last year’s theme was on the environment and I wrote Rock. Paper. Scissors. How Do We All Win? on the topic of the environment and cutting down on paper usage.
How does one break the cycle of poverty? As an entrepreneur, I’m a strong supporter of those who try to make a difference by creating products and solutions that help their local, national, or global community. All ideas are not created equal, but the people behind them are the ones who can cultivate them into something life changing or learn from their failures, pick themselves up and help others on their paths to create something great.
Whether entrepreneurial drive is innate or learned one may never know, but we do know that it can be cultivated and nurtured by the right people, resources, and support. It can also be squashed and abused by people who feel threatened by the passion behind the ideas.
I have heard several of my favorite bloggers mentioned Kiva.org in the past and I thought it was a really neat concept. So for this year’s Blog Action Day, I’ve decided to donate $100 to a Kiva project. However, it looks like I’ll have to wait because all of their projects are currently funded!
Kiva is a site that enables people to give/lend money to entrepreneurs in third world countries who are trying to make a difference in their poverty stricken communities. You can contribute money towards a small loan for an entrepreneur to help him/her get started or purchase some supplies. It’s called micro-lending.
Giving someone the means to try something entrepreneurial to build up their self esteem and add value to their community, is priceless. Giving them the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship first hand from the school of hard knocks is contributing to their life education.
So take a look around you and be grateful for what you have despite the challenging economic times ahead for all of us. If you are reading this blog post, chances are that you are not sitting in a hut somewhere without electricity wondering where your next meal might come from.
Encouraging ideas, creativity, and entrepreneurship is the way we will see ourselves through this downturn. Investing in good people with the entrepreneurial spirit is a fabulous thing to do. Check out Kiva.org and when an entrepreneur and her project surface that you find interesting, consider lending her a few bucks to help her make a difference!
October 2, 2008
Woo Hoo! I submitted a panel idea for the 2009 SXSW Interactive extravaganza a couple of months ago and I was just informed that it was selected! It will be called Building A Web Business After Hours. Although I have several panelists lined up, we have been asked not to finalize the panel yet — probably to make it oh so hugely compelling for all of you to attend!
One of the cool things about being selected is that I get a free Gold Badge pass to attend SXSW interactive and so do the panelists! I probably won’t have much time to party late into the evening unless my husband doesn’t mind watching the kids for 5 days/nights in a row.
Thank you to all of you who voted for the panel idea during the open voting period. It wouldn’t have been selected without your support!
September 27, 2008
I co-write articles for university alumni magazines with my fabulous writing partner Pam Losefsky. You can also see more of our write-ups on the article page of this blog. The last article that we did for the Self Starter series for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is on Kirby Allison (gif). Kirby is a recent graduate and the founder of The Hanger Project. He built the business nights and weekends in school and even after graduating while he held a day job!
Sadly, interviewing these interesting entrepreneurs and writing about them with Pam was one of the things I had to remove from my very full plate of things to do. Both Pam and I took on other commitments ranging from my day job and her additional writing work, that we decided we couldn’t continue to do it and do it well. We’ve been doing articles for The Alcalde for over 3 years now and we really enjoyed working with each other and the editor, Avrel Seale. Life is full of hard decisions and this was one of them. Who knows, we might write for them again when it works for all of our schedules…
I’ll do full posts on past articles we’ve written that I haven’t done one for yet…so keep an eye out for those. An image of Kirby’s article is below and an interesting highlight from his article follows.
“Last fall a confluence of opportunities - a complimentary product review in the Wall Street Journal and a major order from a luxury men’s store in Guatemala - propelled the popularity of Allison’s hangers. He found himself scrambling to air-freight new inventory to meet the Christmas demand. His little side project had become The Hanger Project, a recognized leader in premium hangers.”
September 16, 2008
A friend of mine, Robb Lanum, recently sent me a link to an article on The Onion called Day Job Officially Becomes Job. For those of you who haven’t heard of The Onion, it’s a hilarious publication that makes fun of everything and everyone. Most of the articles I’ve read from them make me laugh or say repeatedly “eww, that’s gross!“ Take for instance a recent, funny article called Woman Always Really Excited To Be In Whatever Relationship Status She’s Currently In.
Robb did an impromptu guest post on my blog a while back about the writer’s strike. He blogs at The Robblog and has been trying for years (probably over a decade) to make it big in the California screen writing scene. He’s made progress and slowly but surely moves his writing career forward or at least makes it more visible by blogging about his experiences.
Robb sent me the link to the article on The Onion because he himself took a day job over four years ago, and he knows the plusses and minuses of having a day job and trying to build your business, your brand, your writing career, etc. He knew I could relate. I’ve been at my day job for not yet 3 ½ months (seems longer) and so far overall it has been a good decision for a variety of reasons, one of which being my husband struck it out on his own to consult and someone had to have the stable job with benefits in the family.
But this day job article by the Onion is not funny. It was written back in February 2004 and begins with “Another human dream was crushed by the uncompromising forces of reality Monday, when the restaurant day job of 29-year-old former aspiring cartoonist Mark Seversen officially became his actual job.“
It then goes on to say “When I was younger, my attitude was ‘Never give in,’” Seversen said. “Nowadays, my attitude is ‘Get real, dumbass.’ If I have any advice for all the young aspiring painters, novelists, and rock musicians out there, it’s probably that they should quit following their dreams before they rack up a lot of credit-card debt. The sooner you accept your real job, the sooner you can start to build up seniority and get on board with the pension plan.”
I expected to be laughing at the end of the article, but found myself frowning instead. Then I thought, “Phew, I’m sure glad being an entrepreneur trying to build a web business after hours is not like trying to be a writer, painter, rock musician, or actor on the side! And working for The University of Texas at Austin isn’t like working in a restaurant.”
Or is it?
September 9, 2008
I’m sure many of you have noticed that I haven’t been blogging as much recently. It’s not due to lack of desire, but due to lack of time and mental energy. I have a full list of topic ideas I want to blog about, but by the end of the day after interesting and bureaucratically taxing events, kids, dinner, husband, baths, teeth brushing, catching up on Babble Soft stuff and personal emails, I feel pretty dazed.
I have blog posts floating around in my head with rarely enough thoughtful time to get them down in a post. Fortunately, I have had some timely guest posters who have filled in some of the gaps.
I can’t say I’ll be able to get to a blogging pace (in the near future) that can keep up with my blogging ideas given my current schedule and life situation, but so far I’ve done a better job at posting than Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning and formerly Netscape, who hasn’t consistently blogged since May 2008! But he’s running a heavily venture backed company so I’m guessing he has just a few more people breathing down his neck than I do.
I’m glad I’m not in his shoes right now in this economy, with the news constantly talking about the questionable results of social networks from a business model perspective, and with some of the widget partner issues his company is facing. But Marc’s a tried and true entrepreneur so I’m sure he and his team will figure something out. If not, he is a millionaire and married to a millionaire so chances are they won’t be out on the streets any time soon.
Yep, it’s all relative and I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given and the opportunities yet to come. Thank you to all of you loyal readers for sticking around!
UPDATE: On an interesting note, Seth Godin, the famous author and blogger on marketing tips & ideas, did a post on September 10 called How often should you publish? and in it he says: “Key assertion: you don’t publish it unless it’s good. You don’t write more blog posts than you can support, don’t ship more variations of that software than your engineers can make marvelous.” So I guess my haphazard blogging is OK because it fits what I can support!
August 29, 2008
The Summer 2008 Olympics are now over. The national conventions for the Democrats and Republicans are happening. Democrats just wrapped up theirs and Barack Obama is the official candidate. The Republicans are up soon and John McCain just announced his VP, Sarah Palin. School has started for all kids across the country. Summer vacations are over. And life goes on.
Like many I watched the Olympics when I found the time in the evening and was fortunate enough to see some of the men and women’s gymnastics, swimming, track and field, and volleyball. I saw the US women’s beach volleyball team win. I saw the women’s gymnastics team win and saw Nastia Lukin win gold. I saw Michael Phelps win several of his gold medals for swimming. One weekend I even caught the Chinese synchronized swimming team. Wow, that was impressive! My husband stayed up later and saw the women’s and men’s volleyball teams as well as the men’s basketball team.
I actually think I was able to watch more of the events during this Olympics than any other Olympics in my life. I’m not sure why that is given that my life is so much busier than it used to be. It’s probably because my husband was watching it and it was a nice (often nerve wracking) way to end the day and see several of the events “live.”
What struck me was how hard all of these athletes have been preparing for the vast majority of their lives for this one shot at gold, fame, and potential sponsorship opportunities from big name brands/companies. All their preparation comes down to a single point in time to succeed or fail. The pressure and mental stress must be extreme, and yet they get up every day to prepare for that one moment in time.
Every individual who competes tries hard, practices hard, prepares hard and only 1 receives the gold medal. The same is true for entrepreneurs but fortunately there aren’t hundreds of little kids competing to win in one particular business (e.g., selling widget X). There may be several competitors in a space but it’s doubtful that the leaders of your competitors started practicing to compete to sell “widget X” when they were 10 or even 5 years old!
However, there seem to be many more factors way out of the control of the entrepreneur that determine their company’s success or failure (e.g., the economy, people issues, product issues, market timing, etc.). An athlete has much more control on whether they get up and practice every day with the major big unknown being a devastating injury. They are rarely blindsided by a last minute entry who ends up being a well-funded Superman/Superwoman athlete!
Building a successful business is extremely hard, costs money, and is time consuming, but after watching the Olympics, my guess is that preparing and then winning a gold medal is harder, requires more discipline, and is more time consuming but with more defined parameters. Even more so if you happen to be a Chinese Olympic team member who are often taken from their parents at a very young age.
People expect athletes to take years or even a decade to train to even make it to the Olympic games, but many expect entrepreneurs to make it big in just a few years and in the process they often burn themselves and others out. I’m guessing that fewer entrepreneurs earn ‘gold medals’ than individuals and teams do every four years in the summer Olympics.
August 17, 2008
I co-write articles for university alumni magazines with my fabulous writing partner Pam Losefsky. You can also see more of our write-ups on the article page of this blog.
Our most recent article for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is on Bart Knaggs (gif). Bart is the founder of Capital Sports and Entertainment which brings us the annual, highly popular Austin City Limits Festival. Here is an interesting quote from his interview:
“There are ways you want to manage opportunities, but mitigating risk, I think takes you down the wrong path.” Instead of thinking that you might lose so you’d better prepare for the crash, Knaggs says you must believe you’re going to take off, so you’ll only prepare to fly. “You have to commit 100 percent to powering the engines and getting up to speed. You have to rally your people, you just have to know you’re going to fly.”
Bart has two kids. After getting his undergraduate degree, he became a competitive cyclist - “a form of self-employment in which the sacrifice is monumental and the payoff only accrues to an elite few.”
One more article in the Self-Starter series will be coming out soon, so sign up for free email updates and you won’t miss it!
