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In the Darkest Hour: Start Something New

Written by: Herb Gilliland

Article Overview: Starting a business was always a dream; so much in fact that it grew and grew in its importance to me as I progressed through college. Parkinson's Law came into effect here: the longer I waited, the bigger the burden seemed to be. Why start a business? I had a plan: an idea that would make me an instant millionaire, but I lacked the desire to endure it alone.

In the Darkest Hour: Start Something New



Starting a business was always a dream; so much in fact that it grew and grew in its importance to me as I progressed through college. Parkinson's Law came into effect here: the longer I waited, the bigger the burden seemed to be. Why start a business? I had a plan: an idea that would make me an instant millionaire, but I lacked the desire to endure it alone. It's hard being an intellectual in the working world, knowing full well the guy sitting next to you has never thought out of the box and the secretary is more concerned about when the bagels are coming. But I didn't just want a business, I wanted a really great job. Well, guess what folks: there's only a few, and tens of thousands of people are vying for them. I've worked as a freelancer for years: and I thought that was the life as an entrepreneur. I made my own hours and I felt like I was my own boss. It was only after my first major failure as an entrepreneur -- failure to secure my IP -- that I realized I had it all wrong. Freelancing and working in a 9-5 are essentially the same. Both require long hours, hard work and dedication to your clients. What's missing is the truly lucrative opportunities that are available to you once you have taken the first step and separated yourself from other people's lucrative opportunities.

Despite my feeling that working for someone else was more of a selfless act, the bottom line became what I was getting out of it. The truth is that the majority of companies will not let an employee be anything other than an employee. While you may get benefits and a vested retirement plan, you won't get what you really deserve: a piece of the action. There's only one track to VP or CEO, and it's a track waltzed by the very few. So the best way to rise in the rungs is to step directly to the top.

There I was: down and out watching my brand and business plan being deployed by other people. It was a desperate situation emotionally and mentally. My five minute speech suggested the next big thing for them; my suggestions had ended up in a dozen major corporate products. The world of "HCI" (Human Computer Interaction) has extended market surveying to software, and it is well established and widely adopted as part of the repertoire of the modern software development team. This means your suggestions for software are now recorded and acted upon immediately. Yet it goes through your mind: this is so wrong, that is so unfair -- why do the laws not keep up with the necessities of inventors? My metaphorical Tesla laboratory was being burned by a figurative Thomas Edison. I did what every American does who needs to pay the bills: I got another job.

In fact, I got a series of jobs over the course of a few years. Each one lasted between two weeks and 6 months and none of them involved benefits, retirement plans, health care or stock options. They paid fairly well -- some as high as $90/hour, some as low as $200 total compensation. The problem, however, had not gone away. I still did not own my own business; I was still trapped in the monotony of chasing mirage positions at companies that would only work through third-party recruiters. I wanted real control: a real way to impact the industry -- a way to leverage my intelligence so that I could take a piece of the action home with me, not just put it off until the next meeting with the PM.

I found a really easy way of getting involved on the ground floor: I was given a percentage of an existing start-up. No longer feeling loyal to my ideas alone, I could now invest time and energy (and ideas) into a company where I was considered a founder. I didn't have to have the next great idea anymore; I could just work hard with existing knowledge and deploy things that I had deployed for all of those other clients and employers, but this time I was deploying them partly for myself. If I came up with a great method of doing something, I could immediately implement that process and I had a platform to build from.

Even though my company doesn't pay my bills, there is still the glimmer of hope that one day it will -- and many times over. That's the blessing in disguise for me. Being bootstrapped and working hard for a company that is partly your own is a different kind of working fervor than any other. You cannot possibly get the same excitement out of showing up for someone else's company that you get when you show up for your own. Moonlighting your way into your own business is infinitely more satisfying than dragging yourself past the watercooler to ABC Corporation's convaluted idea of a dream job. You get to put your ideas into action -- you get to veto other people's lame-brained ideas -- and you get to harvest that oh-so valuable new information, because you're now on the winner's side of that equation.

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Article Tags: darkest hour, defeat, depression, desire, failure, instant millionaire, parkinsons law, recession, start something



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