Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 13:55:37 -0700
| From: | Eric Armstrong |
|
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com |
| To: | unrev-II@egroups.com |
| Subject: | Species survival & open source funding etc. |
Thanks for all that the thought that went into that. I followed my vision once before, when I quit my job and started an Outliner company. Paid my own salary for two years. Cashed in everything I had of value, borrowed from every agency or friend who would loan me anything, and wound up $19,000 in debt -- much of it to the IRS, who came and emptied my bank account for me.
I wound up with a really thorough, though extremely expensive education in how *not* to sustain an activity. Things I learned:
That experience led to a long period of personal inspection, growth, and recovery. There was no one to blame for what happened. The failure was my own. I had to come to grips with exactly why I failed, and how. I had underestimated my weaknesses, and hadn't utilized my strengths. I thought I would be able to manage people and run a business, when the fact of the matter is that I am a designer and communicator, not a manager. I thought that if we had a great technology, people would want it -- not realizing that what people want is *solutions*, not technologies. And I learned that if you can't condense the message into a tight like package that makes people *want* it, you can't pry money out of customers, and you can't pull it out of investors, either.
It's taken quite a bit of time before I was ready to consider trying again. This time around, I plan to avoid the majority of those mistakes. (I plan to make a whole bunch of new ones...) With any luck, this time around the mistakes won't be fatal...
Sincerely,
Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com