start me up! w/Dr. Ron

The first time I hooked up with a start-up, I took a two-thirds pay cut. And got a piece of the action. I was told by a wise professor of mine (a guy I hated, but he was right) that being an entrepreneur was the only way an engineer could ever get rich. When I got my first piece of the action, I remembered what he said.

What he didn’t tell me – what nobody told me – was that being an entrepreneur was wonderful. I got to wear seven or eight hats while I worked for GreyPilgrim, Inc. We were making cutting-edge technology with our bare hands; implementing ideas that came out of our own heads. People came nearly every day to see what we were up to. We were living frugally, but dangerously, as we weren’t making any money. The guys on the team had the friendship that only comes from shared experience. I have many stories about that life; too many to retell here.

But it ultimately ended. GreyPilgrim Inc. went Chapter 7, unable to sell a $250K robot arm and control system to anybody. And I’d left the company some months earlier, unable to sustain myself when going sometimes two, three, four months without any pay at all.

The thing is, I’d never forgotten what those days were like. I had the entrepreneur bug. Plus, my days as an engineer all but ended when I left GreyPilgrim. I’ve found that since the company didn’t survive, most living companies aren’t impressed enough with what I did there.

I taught part-time at a college for eight years, teaching freshmen how to be entrepreneurs themselves. Three of them started companies; two of the companies still exist, years later, while the third former student has caught the bug as well, moving from idea to idea like some kind of venture nomad.

But I could never get that entrepreneur bug out of my system. I think if I could’ve gone back to being an engineer I might’ve had a chance, but nobody in this region was hiring engineers with my background when the economy was good. So I tried teaching in high schools instead. It made me miserable. There is nothing further from the innovation of the start-up than the assembly line of an American public high school. They say teachers make a difference. That’s probably true, for three or four kids per year out of a hundred I was working with. I love kids, but I have no patience for unmotivated, distracted, disruptive kids – the kind I always had in my classes. It was literally making me sick, deteriorating my health.

But I have start-up experience. I know the life. I know how to write a business plan and get it read. I can look at an entrepreneur’s idea and pretty much tell what that idea’s going to need to become real: how much money, what kind of people, which strategic alliances. I finally decided to try being an entrepreneur, full-time, myself: where my role is getting these others off the ground. Having made that decision, I got my health back, and I made some neat new friends and business contacts.

This decision has a cost for me. What little money I’d been able to accumulate in previous careers is all but gone. I’m happy with what I’m doing, but I’m on a course for economic shipwreck and disaster. Unless one or two of the start-ups with whom I’ve thrown in really start to take off, say, by this summer, I’ll be just about penniless, and buried under a mountain of debt. If none of them grow at all, I can see myself even being homeless before the end of the summer.

And this is the truth of entrepreneurship: even if you enter the life with your eyes open, as I have done, you run the risk of losing everything you’ve ever had. What would you take such a risk for? For a chance to make a difference. As an entrepreneur, I have a chance to remake a small part of the world pretty much in my own image. I have a chance to create something, look back on it later and say “I did that.” That’s worth rolling the dice over.

And I have a chance to just maybe get rich. I’m not really counting on it, but I’d like very much not to be homeless.

I’m not looking for sympathy: I got into this life of my own free will. I’m just saying that from now on, this blog will not only be about clarity, it’ll be about counting the cost as well. I’m going to be transparent. If I take a step toward either wealth or poverty, I will tell you. Just please be there to listen.