Thanks for all that the thought that went into that.
I followed my vision once before, when I quit my job
and started an Outliner company. Paid my own salary
for two years. Cashed in everything I had of value,
borrowed from every agency or friend who would loan
me anything, and wound up $19,000 in debt -- much of
it to the IRS, who came and emptied my bank account
for me.
I wound up with a really thorough, though extremely
expensive education in how *not* to sustain an
activity. Things I learned:
* Don't quit your day job
* Don't jump into development without a business model
The technology we wrote 15 years ago may not have been
as advanced as Augment, but it is just as dead. Other
than what I learned in the process, there is nothing to
show for the time spent on the project.
That experience led to a long period of personal inspection,
growth, and recovery. There was no one to blame for what
happened. The failure was my own. I had to come to grips
with exactly why I failed, and how. I had underestimated
my weaknesses, and hadn't utilized my strengths. I thought
I would be able to manage people and run a business, when
the fact of the matter is that I am a designer and communicator,
not a manager. I thought that if we had a great technology,
people would want it -- not realizing that what people want
is *solutions*, not technologies. And I learned that if you
can't condense the message into a tight like package that
makes people *want* it, you can't pry money out of customers,
and you can't pull it out of investors, either.
It's taken quite a bit of time before I was ready to
consider trying again. This time around, I plan to avoid
the majority of those mistakes. (I plan to make a whole
bunch of new ones...) With any luck, this time around the
mistakes won't be fatal...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bids starting at $7 for thousands of products - uBid.com
http://click.egroups.com/1/3027/4/_/444287/_/957992117/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Community email addresses:
Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 10 2000 - 14:03:06 PDT