About six and a half years ago, a man named David Roux came to speak at Rose-Hulman.  I was an undergrad at the time, in my junior year, and I was probably more concerned with an upcoming snowboarding trip to Steamboat Springs than a lecture from some unfamiliar old guy.  However, his main point sunk in: Don’t be a worker bee.  Start.  Lead.  Explore.  Create.  Be an entrepreneur.

As of today, I am officially abandoning my job hunt.  I have found what I was looking for; I had it all along.  The problem was a lack of complete commitment.

I have been doing entrepreneurial things since I was a child.  Mowing lawns at first, later doing IT consulting and computer repair.  While in undergrad, I dabbled in the world of web development by building Bonneville Club, which served as an invaluable lab for me to learn about server administration, community building, people management, and revenue generation.  Later, I experienced the thrill of being web-famous with a couple of popular blog posts and millions of visitors to my webcomic.

The business card from my IT consulting "company" during high school, a decade ago.

I valued my time at Medtronic after undergrad.  I had wonderful co-workers, a company that treated its employees very well, and a salary higher than many see in their lifetimes.  But I wasn’t satisfied.

“I realize this seems odd advice. If they make your life so good that you don’t want to leave, why not work there? Because, in effect, you’re probably getting a local maximum. You need a certain activation energy to start a startup. So an employer who’s fairly pleasant to work for can lull you into staying indefinitely, even if it would be a net win for you to leave.”

— Paul Graham

When I went to grad school, I chose to study entrepreneurship in the Management Science and Engineering program.  I took courses on starting companies.  I attended lectures by famous entrepreneurs.  I talked with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and CEOs.  I idolized my successful-entrepreneur professors. I watched my friends start and build businesses.

There was, I believe, a bit of jealousy. If my friends could do it, why not me?  I mean, I was smart, too.   Why couldn’t I experience the dizzying highs and crushing lows?  Why couldn’t I build amazing products?  Why couldn’t I achieve financial freedom?   Why not?

I have come to realize that there were two things holding me back: fear and social expectations.  For a time I used money or a lack of ideas as excuses, but a detailed examination of business case studies shows that deficiencies in those areas rarely represented insurmountable obstacles.  No, the fear of the unknown kept me locked in place, and that kept me in line with society.  Why give up a good job at a solid company in the pursuit of a crazy dream?  What’s more, society tends to fear change and uncertainty and ostracize those who dare challenge the status quo.  To many, the thought of venturing off on one’s own is pure madness.

But without change there cannot be progress.  Who will move the world if not me?

“If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside. It’s not something you have to know about ‘business’ to do. Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?”

— Paul Graham

In some ways, the economic collapse was the best thing that could have happened for me.   It made my job search difficult to the point of impossibility.  In hindsight, I don’t know why I was looking for a job at an established company instead of venturing out on my own.  Clearly, my heart wasn’t in the hunt.  The challenge was worsened by my desire to switch into a more business-oriented role and away from my technical roots.  I had good discussions with a few companies and interviews with some others, but they seemed loath to help me make that transition.  A few went as far as to offer me technical roles developing software, but such capitulation would be, in my mind, career suicide.  Another job as a software engineer for somebody else would nullify my entire graduate education and permanently cement me in my pigeonhole.  I would rather abandon high-tech entirely than write software in a cube for somebody else.  Oh, and I don’t think I’m a very good programmer.

“You‘ve got all these cops thinking you‘re a lawyer. And you got all these lawyers thinking you‘re some kind of cop. You‘ve got everybody fooled, don’t you?“

— from the film “Michael Clayton”

Writing software for myself is entirely different.  Despite my not being particularly good at it, developing software for my own ends is deeply satisfying.  I love the act of creation.  I love the instant gratification.  I love the communion between me and my machine.

Thus, my startup is a software startup.  Of my many interests — hockey, photography, baking, etc. — software is the one most amenable to company-building.  Who cares if the prototype code is crap?  If it works well enough to get me to the next stage, where I might be able to hire a competent coder to replace my hacker self, then the mission has been accomplished.

Nesota LLC world headquarters

My intent is to give this my all.  When I turn 30 in three years, I want to be either rich or penniless.  The outcome doesn’t matter so much to me as long as it’s not the mushy middle; that would be indicative of a failure.  I want to know that I gave it my full effort.  I don’t want to half-ass it and spend the next decade wondering what could have been.

I’m not rich.  I’m not famous.  I have limited capital, a car with 204k miles on it, and a two-year-old computer.

But I have ambition.  I’m going for it.

(cross-posted at Northstartup)

The drive south from St. Paul along the Mississippi River is one of beauty.  Giant river bluffs overlook the wide expanse of water that is Lake Pepin.  Quiet towns cling to the cliffs; bald eagles soar overhead.  If you follow the river for a few hours, take a left at The Pie Company, and head into the unpaved back roads of Wisconsin, you will eventually come across a most unusual place: a pizza farm.  The pizza farm.

There, an eccentric horticulturalist has joined the growing ranks of amateur genetic engineers to create some most amazing plants.  Tomatoes filled with sauce-like jelly and a slight hint of garlic.  Mozzarella grown molecule by molecule from heavily modified Aspergillus niger molds and a secret bacteria with an affinity for producing casein.  A special yeast unique to the area that imparts incredible flavor into the crust.  It still takes a human hand to combine the ingredients, and there is no magic fire bush to cook the pies, but it’s as close as you can come to growing pizzas on trees.

Ok, not really.  The Pizza Farm, actually A-Z Produce & Bakery, is a farm a few miles northwest of Pepin, Wisconsin.  Every Tuesday night, every week of the year, they sell pizzas on the farm.  Every Tuesday night, droves of people show up on this dusty road in the middle of nowhere to buy said pizzas.  Why make the two-hour journey from Minneapolis for a stupid pizza?

In short, the pizzas are amazing.  Flavorful, fresh, creative, cooked on-site in two giant brick wood-fired ovens.  The Pizza Farm does one thing, and one thing only: pizzas.  There is just one size of pie, and there is none of this by-the-slice tomfoolery.  No drinks either, nor plates or even tables.  Just pizzas, taken directly from the oven and served in delivery-style cardboard boxes.  The crowds that turn out bring their lawn chairs, folding tables, and blankets and spread out on the grass for a pizza picnic.  Many bring wine, and some make a stop at the aforementioned Pie Company for a fitting dessert.

The amazing atmosphere and excellent flavor of the pizzas might be enough on their own, but the unbelievable part of the operation is the source of the ingredients: almost everything in the pizza comes from the farm.  That farm.  As in, the one that surrounds you as you’re sitting on the grass munching on a slice.  Vegetables for toppings?  Grown there.  Wheat for the crust?  Grown there.  Milk for the cheese?  Milked there.  Meat for the sausage?  It had been walking around the land oinking not long before.  You can even complete the cycle, if you’re so inclined, by making a “deposit” in the “bran can,” the contents of which are then used to fertilize the non-food crops.

I visited the pizza farm with a group of friends last Tuesday, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

On the web: A-Z Produce and Bakery, a.k.a. The Pizza Farm.

Two-on-one breakaway.  I come out of my net to aggressively challenge the puck carrier.  Big poke check! The puck ricochets into the corner  …but I lose my stick.  I grab it by the blade and scramble back towards my net.  The offense has passed the puck out to a waiting player at the top of the slot.  He pulls back for a shot.  I slide in, stacking the pads.  He releases the shot, and I reach up with my glove, nabbing it from the air as I’m sliding across the ice on my side!

Save!!! Yay!!!  😀

A few weeks ago, I made a borerline-insane, 38-hour, 2100-mile drive across the country from San Francisco to Minneapolis.  But this post isn’t about the mere 90-minute sleeping stop I made in Wyoming, nor is it about the massive quantities of really horrible truck stop coffee I started consuming around Utah.  No, this is about my quest for more substantial sustinence along the way.  It’s also my way of completely burrying the lede, and a somewhat backwards approach to announcing that I have made said journey.

I generally dislike eating while on road trips, both because of the mess it tends to make in the car and because of the sleepy state it leaves me in.  Not only that, but it’s usually pretty difficult to find appealing food along the way.  What’s not appealing?  Fried, greasy, processed food.  In other words, pretty much everything one would find beside the freeway… except for Subway.

Ah,  Subway.  The bastion of vegetables along the open road.  If a truck stop happens to have a Subway attached to it when I’m hungry, it automatically wins over all neighboring gas stations.  Thanks to good luck, there happen to be a plentiful supply of such stations along most of I-80, so I had some 6″ veggie subs around Nevada and Nebraska.  The price each time? About $2.49, plus perhaps a few cents of tax.  Great.  Fast forward to today.

This afternoon, I was really craving a sandwich, but I was nowhere near home, so I stopped in at Subway for the first time since the drive.  I ordered my usual 6″ veggie sandwich (extra olives, thanks), and was more than a bit surprised to find its price to be $3.00 — about 20% more than it had been.  Making matters worse, the price was the same as many meat-filled options, such as the chicken breast, tuna, turkey, and BLT.  What a rip-off!  An irrational spark of vengence tempted me to order one of the other options — say, the chicken breast — and fling the “free” meat into the trash in front of the employee in some sort of useless protest.

Grrr.  That really irritated me, much more than perhaps it should have.  Maybe it was simply because the same scam is being run on the “$5 footlong” thing — the footlong veggie used to be less than $5, but the price was raised in a sort of subsidy of the meat-filled subs.

What to do?  Well, for the time being, I’m certainly less inclined to patronize Subway.  Now, to find a better on-the-road alternative…

In something that rates pretty high on the “didn’t expect to see that” scale, my neighbor posted this sign today:

Yup, two chickens, miles from the nearest farm.  Given the tasty nature of said birds, it’s a safe bet that they didn’t wander very far.

Part of me suspects that they were pets but became too large.  At least the owners didn’t have snakes or tigers that had crept past the cute stage.