Sunday, July 20, 2014

Glitch In The Soul

Hey,

I'm going

Dark

for a bit.

I need to fix a glitch in my 

soul,


tick

in my 

brain.

: -/

Friday, July 18, 2014

: - /  

I need a vacation.....



Pivot, Right Into A New Startup Build

Hmmm, I read about this "pivot" startups often do. It always seems to be a word that means to me, "make a change in your companies focus, so you can save it's, sinking ass". 

Pivot
I'd think about that word seriously, as I read startup stories mentioning the word pivot. What exactly are they talking about? Then the paragraphs that would follow always lead into a direction the company needed to go, to "stay alive". 

I'm Kind Of An Extremist
I took a pivot, right into building a new startup. No, I didn't do a pivot to make DigiThin a success or save it, surly I could have, if I wanted to. It's not that I quit DigiThin. It's not like, I had to let go of all the employee's, as there were only one, me. It's not that I had to disappoint any investors, I had none of those either. I didn't shut the doors down on it, because I can sort of push it slowly on the side if I want to. At least for the next year. 

The hard thing getting to the point of the pivot, meant accepting failure of DigiThin. Failure has it's own kind of power, it's ruthless in how it torments a person's soul. 

One Day I Had A Bit Of Luck
My startup thinking mind, announced a new startup I should build. It did it slowly over a few weeks time. The whispers rolled in like, a slow ocean. Hitting my thoughts with just enough to tease me into thinking about something else. Yeah, that's the thoughts a great entrepreneur should listen to. But, I'm no great entrepreneur. Yet I had enough sense in me to acknowledge it. 

As it played with my mind, tempting me to follow it. I thought about what I had to give up. What I had to walk away from. 

Disappointing family and friends who believed in me and my idea.  The 55K or more I spent out of my families personal savings. This hurt me like a broken heart in a romance. I kept playing the tapes over and over about how that cash could have paid for my kids college. I kept thinking, I can't walk away from DigiThin now, just at the point I finally figured out how to get traction. 

My Answer Was Always In Me
Yeah, I burned a ton of cash that could have done other things. I also gave myself an education worth more than the price of an education. 

Just as the teasing thoughts tempted me, in a slow but quick way. I jumped onto the other boat. I can honestly say, it's the most amazing freeing feeling, I've had in two years. I'm loving my new startup. It's like AMAZING times liquidation preference 1.5X!

Yet, I'm in this weird half the weight on my shoulders, and half the weight off area. At times, I'm so free to create, then other times I'm burdened down by the startup I have to let go. Truly it's like saying good bye to a lover when you know the relationship is over, yet the talks to stay together go on.

Ahh, The Majesty Of My New Love Is So Grand
My new startup is not limited to a certain market. It's a product for every person, every race, every culture, everyone! Hmmm, to me this means something pretty special, it's HUMANITY. It's all of us. That's why those whispers in my head are something I cannot turn away from. It's a product for each and every person, young and old. How can I not chase it? How can I not create it? To turn away from it, would be like turning away from mankind. It would be like saying I don't care about you, when I do. 

I have no more family cash to put into my new startup. It won't matter. I've learned so much from building DigiThin, that I know if this new startup wants to live, the whispers in my mind, the skills I learned, the people I've met, the mistakes I've made, the hope in my heart, the path I've followed, will all come together to build one of the greatest gifts for humanity. 

I'm listening to the whispers......

I'm chasing my new startup....... 

I'm seeking this gift for humanity......


* I wrote this after being awake 27 hours. Hope it's good : - /


 

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Reasonably Paranoid: IP Issues For Startups

Intellectual Property

In high school language arts class, there was a poster on the wall that said "Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They Are Not Out To Get You"

I memorized it, as I read it every day for a whole entire school year. I was mystified by it. Perplexed, confused and unsure of it's meaning. Of course I was paranoid in high school, as I smoked pot and took hallucinogenics. I was paranoid every single day. 

As the year went on, the poster seemed to be some sort of personal message to me. Everyday I asked myself why the teacher would have that poster on the wall? What the heck was he trying to teach me? Or tell me? At times, I was sure he knew I smoked pot and he wanted to freak me out! Scare me so much so, that I would stop smoking the now legal drug in my state, Colorado.

Being a startup builder there is this funny thing us founders have to be "reasonably paranoid" about, according to the book Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. It is Intellectual Property. Yeah, that good old thing in our mind called our "Ideas". Now the poster burned into my head says this "Just Because You're Reasonably Paranoid, Doesn't Mean Someone You Had Beers With While Discussing Your Startup Idea, Won't Fuck The Hell Out Of You" down the road, when you get funding and you're building your idea into a preforming company. 

I find this to be one of those funny areas of the startup dilemma. First of all, after you get over your paranoia of sharing "what you think is the greatest idea in the world" because you are so afraid someone will steal it. You go through all kinds of good's and bad's to get to the place where you can only believe in your own idea, when random people sign up for your idea on your website, let alone share it with a friend.

I do not remember who quoted this statement, I read it in one of  Paul Graham's essays, but it said essentially this "You have to shove your idea down their throats to get them to believe it" I found that to be true.

No One Is Going To Steal Your Damn Idea!

Get that in your startup head. The problem is the leeches. They are sort of like internet trolls. This is the person whom you thought was your friend, and you went drinking with and you shared your great idea with, and they put in their helpful friendship info, and said, "Oh yeah that's a cool idea, and you could do this" they contributed what you thought was just a friend helping you shape your idea, but nine months later your baby startup is blossoming into something beautiful and they remembered that drinking night and they looked at their sorry ass life and realized they had no money, and your startup was looking like it was going to have money so they got a lawyer, and they waited until your hard work was ripe and they pounce on you. "You owe them half the company!" the lawsuit says. Gulp, what?

Loophole Leeches

Yep, you don't really have to worry about sharing your idea because no one is going to steal it. Stealing your idea would be a ton of work for someone to build. It's probably one of the least likely things to happen. The problem is someone claiming they were "in on the idea with you" that's the problem. I call these types leeches because they don't want to work. They just want to leech onto all the hard work you did, and claim it's theirs too. These are lazy types in my mind. These are the type who want to find loopholes to suck the benefits they did not earn out of others. Sadly, we have many loopholes in our laws, and leeches and trolls have nothing better to do while sitting around doing nothing, so they look for good companies to suck blood out of. 

Sad really. I think a ton of progress is being done to stop internet trolls and hopefully we also we be able to stop leeches. Because we really ought to have the right to share our ideas with our friends without the fear of them getting all legal on us. : - /  

What Leeches Are In My Life?

After reading about this potential danger that could derail my startup from getting funding in my Venture Deal class I went over all the idea sharing/beer drinking stories in my past and yeah, I have a potential leech. The good thing is the idea I'm chasing now is not the one I shared with this leech. Whew! Still, the worry that some casual friend whom asked what I was up to, and I spilled the beans, could lead to a legal issue in the future is a bit troublesome for my good soul to like. 

I think we will always have to face these type of issues in startup life and in regular life. We just have to live up to our standards of ethics, and not be derailed by the cruelty of others. Sometimes a hard task to do. But us good people just do it, knowing that if we have to carry the bricks for the leeches, we will do it. 




Saturday, July 12, 2014

A Founder With Third Grade Grammar

I do not know what happened to my two brothers and I, but we somehow could not learn. Out of the three of us, I'm the one who can somewhat write. If you read any of my brother Tim's letters, you'd think he was in third grade. He is actually deceased as well as my brother Mark, whom just passed away this past March. Tim also passed away in March, just fifteen years ago. Maybe I'm next, I don't know. 

The one thing we had in common beside an intense struggle with life was the fact we sucked at learning. 

I think that no one has ever commented on my blog, because they would somehow be shamed if they comment on an article that is ridden with incorrect grammar usage. Oh, I use grammar helpers, and still, I cannot let my mind escape, because my fingers cannot type the expressions without the understanding of all the grammar rules. 

It's funny, I use Ginger and it seems so so. Then I hit publish on my Wordpress blog and it comes in and says that I have done all kinds of things incorrectly. It makes me feel like a super big idiot failure! 

How will any VC, Angel or potential user, believe in my idea if they read this worthless crap I write? I have run into grammar police plenty of times and well, it's just way too hard for them to read this crap. I can understand that.

This is like my golf handicap. I struggle with all the educational skills we were to learn while growing up. You really don't know what it's like to be 52 years old and write like a third grader. It's super hard to be trapped in a lifelong learning disability. And yes, I do believe I have one. It's called if I don't use it, I lose it, if I don't understand it, I can't make it make sense in my brain, it's called, if I wasn't building startups maybe I'd have time to spend on learning to understand what I missed out on in early education. 

I don't have the time, because I'm learning all kinds of other things that take up my time to build. So I use the grammar helpers, and I'm thankful for them, yet it's still not a full proof answer. I am so frustrated. I want to express myself and it all comes out in a way that only makes sense in my brain. No one else knows my brain code.

Here is one of the saddest letters I have ever read, written by my brother Mark.


If you are able to read this, just add 10x worse for my brother Tim's writing.

: - ( 

Yeah, I'm kind of sad tonight.





Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Actively Pursuing My Next StartUp

The struggle for startup success can weigh down the soul of an entrepreneur. Yes, just yesterday I felt like the biggest worthless failure, that I even had the thought of ending my life, pass through my mind.

Of course I would never take my life, but I'm not exempt from the thoughts. I know that I could push DigiThin to scale, but DigiThin's scalability is limited to the weight loss market. Big, competitive and a billion dollar industry for sure. Yet my next startup scales massively bigger than DigiThin.

This past month my new Startup, started haunting my mind. Teasing me with the temptation of mind blowing scalability. Yeah, I did my usual thing and told the thought in my head to get the fuck out. Of course I'm not going to build again, especially alone! So don't dangle the teasing idea of impacting the world in a massive way in my brain. No thank you.

The problem is. My mind won't let it go. It will keep haunting me. It will keep dangling the desire to build, so I have to pursue it. I told my mind, okay, I will do it, but I'm doing it the smart way this time. I'm going to do my market testing and either generate proof of need. Evidence of want. Desire for something people never knew they couldn't live without. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. ; - ) about as hard as getting traction for your website release when it's on the bottom of the pile of a gazillion websites! 

Today was really amazing. I met with a super great person Greg Bond the creator of In Bond Marketing, whom also works with the smoking hot entrepreneur Erik Wolf at ORBTR.net Greg helped me to shape the path of how to show "evidence of need" for my new startup. In my article Startup Porn I speak about how anything that excites you to build a great company is startup porn. That is what Erik and Greg are to me. They both are awesome entrepreneurs whom put the excitement in me to build! 

After our meeting I felt extremely empowered to make this great pivot in my startup path. I'm not abandoning DigiThin. I'm not killing DigiThin. I'm not declaring it a failure.  If DigiThin has any life in it, it will have to rise up on its own, in its own time. 

For now, I'm actively pursuing my next startup.  








Monday, July 7, 2014

Apple Smile




Smile

Your Frustrations Will Turn Into

Something Positive

Just Wait Out The Pain

Sunday, July 6, 2014

I Wish I Wasn't A Crazy Entrepreneur

Sometimes I really hate being an Entrepreneur. Or maybe really, it's just that I can't stand my own self. I get the crazies often. It's some sort of wildness that cuts through my soul. 

Sometimes it makes me say and do things that offend others. That really hurts me, cause I don't like hurting others. I know how much it hurts me when others dish out pain. I'm sorry if I hurt you.

Today I wish I could be a normal person, who goes to a normal job, and lives life, like normal. Hmm, probably won't happen. 

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Twitter, Whisper, And The Human Desire To Talk

Interesting. Tonight I had a little tiny convo on Twitter with Fred Wilson. He was super kind and wanted to change my Twitter situation, where I felt, "no one on Twitter talks to me" I really appreciated his action to make me feel like part of the community. There is nothing better than a person who reaches out. Thank you Fred : - )

Still, as the convo went on, I brought up the truth that Twitter is different for people who were in it from the beginning or near beginning because they have a whole different experience then the people like me, who came in six years later. The early people have no idea how it is now. Well, to them it's super awesome and cool, and they get lots of interaction. They have hundreds of thousands of followers, of course they are going to get "talk action" but the people like me, well, we struggle to get anyone to talk to us, or follow us. Personally, I've been locked into "No follow Prison" for 10 months now. And I wonder, why the hell I waste time on it. 

One of the problems is the use of API. Now these interfaces are a double edged sword. It's great in one way, yet it actually causes the problem of "no human interaction" in the other way. For example, one day I tweeted, "Is anyone actually on Twitter right now? Or are all these posts sent through API?" Not one comment did I get. I felt lonely. I felt like Twitter was some sort of weird posting site in a grocery store, where I should rip off the phone number tag and call the poster if I wanted what they offer, or at the least talk to them.

Another Twitter person agreed with me. He felt Twitter users have their circles and only talk to those people. Maybe so, or maybe not, the fact is, there is a big problem looming for Twitter and other social networks, but can they see it?

My beloved WhisperApp
Oh, how I love Whisper. Why? Many people in the technology industry, VC's and Angels, shrug it off as something that has come before and will fade away. Many people in the industry think anonymous apps are immature. They seem to toss Apps like Whisper to the side as if it's going to die and it's worthless and of course "They are too intelligent to waste time on it" Hmmmm

Whisper has something all the other social networks ought to pay attention to. They have harnessed the deep social problem for so many millions of people. They have given us, someone to talk to. The human desire to talk to other humans, is worth more than a bank of Twitter followers. It's worth more than, well, pretty much breathing. Us humans, we need each other, and we love talking to each other. So if your social network makes it hard for people to talk to each other, well, what do you think will happen to you and it? 

My Hard Day
Today was a really hard day for me. My twin brother was found dead in March and today for no reason, I was consumed with sadness. My body was taken over by some sort of force of depression. I couldn't achieve anything today. All I accomplished was wandering around my house. I even had thoughts of "fuck it" what's the point of building a startup? If I had put a call out to my Whisper friends, I know what I would have gotten. They would have come to my side and stood with me through this pain. Supported me. Been there for me. Yeah, I've done it in the past with Whisper. These are real people who care. You might think it's a bunch of sex driven post, but hey, who ever said sex was bad? The reality is these people on Whisper may predominantly post about sex, but they are humans who will talk, they're not just about sex. 

I've been on Twitter almost two years and Whisper around six months. I have so much human connection on Whisper, and almost none on Twitter. Hmmm Math, seems to make sense now.

I have a bank of Whisper friends outside of Whisper. They are not anonymous any longer, they are people like you and me. They are my friends. I am sure Twitter is this way to people. I'm positive that Twitter users are humans with hearts too, but I haven't been able to make the connections like I have on Whisper. I do have one Twitter friend whom I will always love dearly, Eddie the eyeball, I call him. He is a person who would support me in any kind of crisis. But no one else on Twitter. I can't make the human connection on Twitter like I can on Whisper. 

That's it ~ The Human Connection

If your social network can't achieve that, surely you will leave it. I hang onto Twitter, because, I'm not sure why. I think I want to find the wonderfulness that I hear others talk about. I keep wanting to bask in it's pleasure that I hear others talk about, yet it's still so far away from me. And possible, it will never come.  

Hey Fred, I hope you can change it for me, I'd love to see the world of Twitter that others talk about. Truly, I'm chatty, I don't have a problem with participation. ; - ) I love people, and I love to talk. 

Happy 4th Of July everyone! Please have a great week, weekend, and be safe ~