So it’s one of those days with $300 of unavoidable medical expenses, forget about private health insurance, so heck - what does the entrepreneurship theory say about funding : “friends and family” - Well that’s a capital F for the latter, and what do they say about family - U cant choose them + they love u unconditionally ? But there is no money that is unconditional. Every transaction has it’s cost, and ledgers don’t forget.
So on a Superbowl Medical Monday - there was a touchdown at halftime on the superbowl and Ben Graham’s team is down 16 points to 7 - but he’s playing a ripper game they say - he punted one inside the 20 line.. of which he’s done 10 this year - which mightily impressed the commentators (im listening to audio stream ere and espn live score ere)…. BobParsons dot me, suitably the GoDaddy.com founder/ceo, is required reading. He discusses his pre GoDaddy.com venture which he built from nothing to a $64m exit (and then lost and reinvested in the aptly named discount domain/hosting playa GoDaddy who my domains r with!) The handy (given no funding dilution by sounds of it) $64m exit was despite the business going inactive and failing many times, which I’ve got to say is reassuring to hear. From what he says- it sounds as if the vision remained constant, and product/marketing strategy adaptive. I could have added the whole post there is so much insight there*, but my favourite extracts below.
What a Pad via Contemporist in New Zealand.
“‘Failing at anything can leave one feeling very alone. The biggest challenge to overcome when mitigating failure, comes from friends and family. Because I was always working either on my regular job or trying to make Parsons Technology work, I was just about always unavailable for getting together with friends and other activities. And because I continually put all my extra cash into my little company (and lost the cash) my family didn’t do much outside of simply living our normal lives.’ + On quitting : ‘The easiest thing to do in the world is to quit and give up on your dreams (and quite frankly, that’s what all the non-risk takers want you to do).”
Never Quit, Fail, and Fail Again : “I had $15,000 to get the company going. It was made up of cash and credit available on my Visa and MasterCard.. I tried different approaches with the advertising, tweaking this and tweaking that. Nothing worked. I lost the entire $15,000.. One thing I always did was pay my bills. Never did I leave anyone unpaid, and never did I pay anyone late. So whenever I ran out of cash (which was often) I would simply make the company inactive until I found more money.. The following year I came into $25,000 and was able to get the company going again. I got this money from three sources. The first, and most significant source, was a bonus from my full time job. The second was from the tax refund associated with the earlier loss. And the third was from what I could squeeze aside from my paychecks after paying my bills.. Eventually, and before that year was over, I lost the entire $25,000, and my little company became substantially inactive once again.. The easiest thing to do in the world is to quit and give up on your dreams (and quite frankly, that’s what all the non-risk takers want you to do).. So with plenty of cash (at least for me), and the software significantly improved, I went to work once again to make the company work. This time I dropped the price to $69 and then to $49. I purchased different types of magazine ads.. Once again, I learned quite a bit about how not to market software. Eventually, and before that year was over, I lost the entire $25,000, and my little company became substantially inactive once again.”
$64M Success + Reinvestment, Losses + Cycle begins Again : “My vision came true. Parsons Technology’s customer base grew to over 3 million names and we had close to a 4% share of the North American software market in terms of units shipped. Our employee count grew from just Martha and myself working in the basement, to almost 1000 employees. The company made money, usually a significant amount, each and every year after I moved it out of the basement. Martha and I sold it to Intuit in 1994, ten years after I started it, for $64 million dollars. By any measure, Parsons Technology would have to be considered a success.. As for the $64 million, I used my share to start GoDaddy.com and get it off the ground. I also took a pretty good beating in the stock market when the dot com stocks crashed. But that’s another story that is best told in an earlier blog article titled, “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed. Parking cars for a living.”
Marc Canter Distributed Friending
Listening to Later : Podcast with Friendfeed founder… I continue to ponder how to develop products based out of Australian region, and get access to engineering talent near that of the Friendfeeds. (*obviously the biggest issue is availability.. and startups in australia due to low funding hence low pay, bad equity structures, lack of exits and thus track records, inability to export.. etc etc means engineers work at google, telcos, banks, insurance and consultants - they maximise their salary/daily rates + benefits.. buy property and gadgets.. and their skills gradually go out of date past hobbies* Which engineering teams based out of Australia well minus Google, Atlassian is doing the following type of work mentioned on TC_IT about friendfeed : “Meanwhile, Taylor says FriendFeed is moving forward with enhanced realtime tools to help model Twitter and other data. Rooms will gain now controls for aggregating multiple streams, a major search-related announcement is coming later this week, broader filtering and track functionality awaits a several-month rewrite of some parts of the core architecture, and most importantly, FriendFeed will continue to employ an open, inward and outward-facing data strategy. This is in sharp contrast to both Twitter and Facebook, who allow ingress but limit outbound flow.”
* In general, and I often ponder this in good or bad times, whether like many Americans suggest -
A. cut your losses and move on (pick your window if u miss it then wash/rinse/repeat) OR
B. take the hits/failures/adapt/keep with the same entity(s) and keep rolling, a decade later it may all turn out $64m better. Then your next venture ala GoDaddy founder post, and as Jason Calacanis has explained why he founded Mahalo to go after search meets wikipedia as he already had his first/smaller Weblogsinc exit. The idea of serial entrepreneurship being getting your first small exit, then increasing the scope and size of each following business and hopefully the return etc.. I am pondering this on Superbowl Medical Monday, because after a month of thinking/trying.. it’s time to enact the decisions and speak to some people - there is alot going on obviously (a diversity and quantity of trusted market information is useful when u r too much in yer own head and not enough in yer hip pocket, not to mention the market could be very bad this year and I need to get a read on whether australia’s dysfunctional oligopolies and slowness to market means whether 2009 will be the Year of Enterprise 2.0 (incl Media/Fortune 500 companies rolling out B2C 2.0) in Australia, or whether they will use overseas market recession and google/yahoo contractions as reasons to stick to the traditional Web 1.0 businesses (i worked for sensis doing last dot crash, which was in effect a late to market dot com period for the yellow company.. so im wondering whether that will repeat this year… wouldn’t be surprised.. depends on unemployment, google valuation… and um general sentiment towards progressive online businesses downunder… ok im listening to rest of superbowl its 20 to 7 against bens graham team, finishing a powerpoint for 2009 roadshows then going to denti$t)
C. get a job, consult, project manage… got nuthin at all against work (heck there hasnt been a year i didnt do it since well school/uni y’know what i mean).. i’d love to be mindless again.. how i would crave a regularly transferred substantial amount of money to consumerly gluttonous consumption 
