For just about as long as I can remember, I’ve worked for myself doing my own thing. Things really started out with a company called The Guild Inc., a dial-up access company back when dial-up was cool and 28.8k modems ruled the day. I dropped out of college (don’t worry, it was only community college) to start a company with a friend of mine named Jester. Yep. Jester. There we were, Amal and Jester. Two kids barely 17 and 19 with totally effed up names and no experience, trying to run a serious business. We had the technical knowledge, personal drive, and overall commitment to make it succeed… but in the end our infighting, teenage management skills, poor direction from the board (“adults”), and ultimately the entry of Verizon and other telcos into the space basically killed us on the spot. After a failed attempt at a sale of the company, we just gave up our users and domain name (tgi.net) to a rival company, who seem to still doing well to this day.
I went from there to Boeing, where I worked as a temp for probably way too long. While I was there I met a guy interested in starting a web hosting and development company. We called it Morpheus Inc.. The name Morpheus was chosen not after the guy in The Matrix (we thought it up well before The Matrix came out), and not because we made file sharing software, but after the Greek God of Dreams. To this day I still get calls from people upset because they can’t figure out how to download music. It was a very rocky start, but we did alright for a bit there… and then the company started nosediving. As cheaper and cheaper hosting services started cropping up, and with a partner who basically jumped ship to go work at Microsoft, it wasn’t looking good. As a final act of kindness, I took the last chunk of change in the bank account and bought out that partner for, well, not very much money. So, with basically $0 in the bank, I shutdown our website and powered off the web server it was running on. I still had some support type work I was doing for clients, but it was not sustainable… it was too feast or famine, and it involved a lot of driving around, which you can only do so much of in a day and still make money.
Things looked grim… until I took a road trip to the Northwest Renewable Energy Festival in Walla Walla Washington. There I heard a speech from Amory Lovins of the Rockey Mountain Institute. During the speech, he talked about the concept of “products as a service”. The example he gave that I remember so well was carpet. Nobody wants to own carpet. Nobody wants the burden of ownership when it comes to cleaning it or replacing it when it goes bad. They just want something to walk on that is soft on the feet and looks nice. Then he went on to talk about a company that was providing modular carpet as a service, where you would pay a small monthly fee and they would come out and check your carpet every once in a while, replacing stained or worn carpet for free as part of the service by simply removing the carpet module and replacing it. This business model then allowed for the easy recycling of carpet modules and reuse of those recycled modules once they had been reconditioned/recycled, which was all good for the planet.
As I sat there listening, this whole service approach got me thinking about computer support and the reasons companies need it. Right there in the auditorium seat I came up with a plan to supply managed computing services to the medical industry that would remove the cost and burden of ownership of owning and operating a PC based network. I gathered a few clients and worked out the details and overcame various hurdles and was doing alright… and then, disaster… divorce. If you’ve ever seen a train hit a brick wall, that’s pretty much what happened to my business. Being a one-man show has it’s weaknesses, and the biggest one is the guy holding everything up. It was a hard hit, and after I picked up what was left I managed to keep existing clients up and running (many still are today), but I had to move on to something different.
While building Morpheus back up with this managed service approach, I had been doing side work for a wireless/mobile messaging company called WireCutter. They were involved creating mobile marketing campaigns for various radio stations, sending SMS text messages to mobile phones. I had an idea for a more public use group messaging application, but they were focused on their market… so I started my own company called txtGroups. I poured my life savings into keeping myself alive (you know, eating, lights, heat, etc.) while I worked non-stop on building the business and messaging platform. I made one mistake though, I hedged my bets on a premium mobile service based on non-impulse buys. It turns out people are happy to pay $1.25 one time to get a horoscope or stupid mobile joke sent to their phone, rather than pay $1.00 to get a joke each week at $0.25 per joke. I guess there’s something about seeing all those $0.25 cent charges on the bill that just eats at a person’s soul. Even though the overall cost is less, and they get more for it, seeing a flat $1.25 or in some cases $3.50 or more for a single stupid impulse buy is somehow better than seeing a single dollar’s worth of individual $0.25 charges. Honestly though, we had some pretty good content from some great companies… it was just a matter of getting those companies to market their own mobile services (provided via txtGroups’ messaging platform). A couple of them did a great job and they accumulated the most mobile subscribers, but it just wasn’t fast enough to break even before the cash ran out. My bank account was again down to zero, the investment I was able to gather together from outside sources had come and gone, and I was utterly burnt out. I had worked non-stop for years on everything from being CEO to DBA to floor sweeper… it was time to hang it up for a bit and focus on finding a buyer for the company and the sweet mobile messaging platform I built… So once again I found myself in the familiar position of having to shut down the server that maintained connections to the mobile carriers’ SMSCs and figure out what to do next.
But a guy’s gotta eat, so I started poking around my home turf for a day job. While sitting in a local sushi place, I spied an old client sitting across the way. This particular client had her own business troubles a few years back and eventually ended up going bankrupt on me. It wasn’t the first client that had gone bankrupt and left me holding an AR balance to try and write off, but it was definitely the largest amount I’d ever been stiffed for. As I finished my meal, I found myself in one of those classic “remain cranky and walk out, or just go over and say hi” moments. I decided to just let it go and make my presence known. She was surprised to see me, and was probably just as surprised I made a point to come say hi. We chatted nicely for a bit and she told me to call her up so we could talk some more. She gave me her phone number on a chunk of paper, which I stuffed in my wallet and thought “yeaaahhhh, we’ll see”.
When clearing out my wallet a couple weeks later, again I had one of those “call her, or toss it” moments. I ended up just calling her and eventually she invited me over to chat and meet her fancy new boyfriend, who I heard was possibly in the market for a consultant to help some people at his company out with some kind of database problem. We chatted for a bit… all the usual “what are you doing now, etc.” type talk, where I mentioned that I was job hunting. Then they invited and Jennifer (my fancy new wife 2.0) and I over for a upcoming get-together with a guest list that would include company members involved with the aforementioned database problem.
One thing led to another and suddenly, at the insistence of my past client’s fancy new boyfriend and another co-owner, I found myself sitting as Director of IT for OutBack Power Systems. I’ve been working overtime there for just about 9 months now trying to sort out the IT department, fight typical support fires, and keep up with a company growing so fast they are just about bursting at the seams. I’ve been so busy I’ve barely had time to do anything else… but things are slowly coming together, and I’ve never enjoyed working a corporate gig as much as I do here. The people are awesome, and the company does something I actually believe in.
When I finally came to the realization that I was too fried to survive off my own business merits and I’d have to get a day job somewhere, my sparkling new wife asked me what kind of industry I wanted to work in. I told her I wanted to work with something involving alternative energy… fuel cells, electric cars, solar panels… that kind of thing. Electricity fascinates me because it is something that can do just about anything with from powering satellites in space to moving us around in electric vehicles… and it’s possible to create in so many different ways, from solar panels to hamsters on generator wheels.
Now that things are more or less under control at OutBack, I need to reign in my personal life and take care of my other commitments. I need to decide whether to find some business partners to take over txtGroups and pursue a different business model with, or continue to try to sell it off. Anyone wanna buy a sweet mobile messaging platform?
