Even at MIT, the assumed ideas about what one does after graduation are generally limited to two paths: go to grad school, or get a job. And for those that do think about entrepreneurship, starting a company seems to be totally inseparable from "venture capital / go big or go home / burn rate / figure out how to get bought by Google or Microsoft."
In fact, in 2008 I attended a panel discussion titled,
"Startups: High Risk and High Reward", which was tremendously interesting, but not at all for what I expected. Instead, it was interesting for me mostly because I found that the panel's perception of "high risk" was simply that the company might not exist in 12 or 24 months to pay a near-or-slightly-below-market engineer's salary, and "high reward" was at most a few percentage points of equity. Maybe I missed the point -- I suppose now that it was really targeted at students considering being an employee of a startup, rather than a being founder -- but to me, "high risk" means that you can't pay the rent if you don't have enough revenue, and "high reward" means getting to do something you love, setting your own course, getting paid for it, and owning a substantial portion of the resulting endeavor.
(If you're curious about these perceptions, Paul Graham further addresses the "I must be part of some institution" mentality that so permeates our society in his essay
"How to Make Wealth" under "What a Job Is," and Jonathan Wegener addresses the "Small can be sustainable" issue in a
two-part post. Jonathan's article ties in deeply with the concept of being "Ramen Profitable," and I think he does a great job of getting at the math that is so simple but also so vital -- I only wish we could further emphasize the qualitative freedom aspects as well!)
When it became clear that I was headed off to work for myself, in a strictly-bootstrapped, already-profitable company of my own creation, with 50% equity stake, accountable to only my customers, my co-founder, and myself, and no particular exit strategy in mind, each of these elements was almost directly opposite to what many around me expected from a person who is joining a startup!
So to help demystify what this particular self-employed small Internet business owner's job is like, I made a brief log of one workday: Wednesday, December 9th, 2009.
7:30am: While I normally get up around 10am, on this day I woke up early and wasn't able to fall back asleep, so I decided to get going a bit earlier than usual.
After rolling out of bed, I made my 20-foot commute to my office and checked our internal dashboard on my laptop. This let me verify that that our server systems were running properly, and quickly look at some sales and traffic stats, all within a 10 second glance at my screen. Next, I took care of personal tasks: brushed teeth, took a shower, and washed some dishes.
8am: At this point, I got into the meat of my morning, which is a combination of responding to tech support e-mails, e-mail questions from not-yet-customers, and last actually processing all of the orders in the system that had come in both from our website and from Amazon.com. This involved looking at all the orders that we had received in the past day and getting them ready to ship, making sure our estimates of size and weight were accurate, and then preparing a prepaid USPS shipping label for each package, and finally closing the loop by getting tracking information back out to the customer. My co-founder arrived during this time period, and he jumped in to tackle support e-mails and respond to new posts on our forums. This is all of the "nuts and bolts" of keeping the business running smoothly, and ultimately, this is not a business on auto-pilot -- it requires many hours of daily involvement to keep running. (In fact, this day was probably lighter than usual on the number of support e-mails, letting us get to lunch earlier!)
After dealing with e-mails and orders, I updated our statistics spreadsheets. While we have scripted a lot of this to happen automatically, there are a few manual tasks, which included looking at Google Analytics and Adwords data and looking for anything unusual, keeping track of our cash position across bank and merchant accounts and accounts payable, maintaining the state of our inventory counts, and keeping an eye on orders from suppliers. As mentioned before, a great deal of the statistics-keeping is automated, so all this takes roughly about 10-15 minutes.
11:00am: After having taken care of the "nuts and bolts" of keeping everything running smoothly, it was time to get distracted with all the other things I can choose to think about on any given day. I stopped for a mid-morning coffee break. (While our normal instant coffee routine was just fine, the recent addition of a French Vanilla creamer has added tremendously to our quality of life.) Then I replied to a few personal e-mails.
I spent time fiddling with getting our new VoIP business phone line set up. While we don't currently offer phone support, we do need to have a number for various business things, and the real motivator was that since moving to our new space in San Diego, I've been unable to get cell phone coverage at my desk, and have to go outside or into one particular corner of my place to make a call. (In fact, we recently drove by a big AT&T building in Mira Mesa, and I checked my phone and it said, "No Service"!) So we've set up our own system, running our own Asterisk instance and we have a WiFi SIP phone at my desk. This time was spent fiddling with the Asterisk extensions.conf and sip.conf files, as well as 802.11 settings on the phone. (Ultimately, I was able to get it mostly working, and in the following days I made a few changes to get it all operating just as we wanted.)
Next, I followed up on a Craigslist transaction I was working on, doing some research and sending an e-mail inquiry about a Smithy CB1220-XL combo lathe/mill/drill machine that I was interested in buying. (Photos
here. We did end up getting the machine!)
1:15pm: Humberto and I left for lunch, which is definitely an opportunity we take advantage of every day to get outside and get perspective and think in broader / strategic terms. This day, we drove to one of our nearby favorites, Habanero's Mexican Grill (see
http://www.yelp.com/biz/habaneros-mexican-food-san-diego), which has excellent food, free chips/salsa around lunchtime, and interesting specials on a regular basis. On this day I got their special which was a non-menu item: a Milanesa Plate (thin, batter-fried beef) with rice, beans, some lettuce and guacamole, and some corn tortillas. A photo is below. Definitely a new experience for me, and an excellent meal. We took this opportunity to discuss some bigger-picture plans and how to proceed on various projects.
While at lunch, a call came in from our order fulfillment team who were at work shipping the orders I had put through earlier in the morning. Without going into the details of the issue, we ended up solving it using an iPhone, a 3G connection, and an SSH terminal client app running on the phone, all while we're eating at Habanero's. This is not the first time the iPhone+SSH combo has helped us keep everything running smoothly while on the go!
2:30pm: We returned back to the office from lunch, and I continued to tinker with the VoIP system, and fixed the Caller ID behavior.
3:00pm: That lunch was pretty heavy, so I stopped to watch some TV.
3:30pm: I did some general web surfing as a distraction, and checked out my usual
Hacker News,
Slashdot, and then a few blogs in our DIY electronics space, like
Hacked Gadgets and
Hack a Day. I started pondering
Reddit's new sponsored listing service, and then got distracted and did some reading about how car starter motors work, in preparation for some future projects.
4:15pm: I was not being productive, so I decided to just take a nap.
5:00pm: Woke up from nap. Started tinkering with one of the new video tutorials projects we have in the pipeline, tackling a strange problem we were experiencing. After a bit of brainstorming, I announce, "Let's add some resistors in these six locations along these digital I/O lines." While a bit counterintuitive from the digital perspective he'd been used to thinking in, we had been building things together long enough that Humberto knew that there's a reasonable chance I'm on to something, so he played along. But even I was somewhat surprised when it just worked! With that problem out of the way, we were all set to start preparing the script for the new video. (This videos was released a few days later as our
Multi-Panel LED Array with SPI.)
6:30pm: With one major technical hurdle tackled, and since I'd been up for a while and my girlfriend returned home, Humberto decided to leave, and that was the end of the "official" workday.
While it sounds like a 11-hour workday, the truth is that it never truly ends, and in this case I tried to tackle more support e-mails as they came in later that evening and handle other special requests, while writing some code for yet another future project, and looking over a draft script for the video mentioned above. Weekends are different only in that they usually get started later in the day and no orders get shipped. There's no doubt about it, it's hard work, but it's also a lot of fun, we don't kill ourselves (notice an extended lunch, TV watching, and naptime all included in the "workday"), and we really enjoy helping our thousands of "students" (customers) learn and get empowered and excited with new skills. Customer interactions via e-mail and our forums are a huge part of the day, and that's a constant reminder to us that we're really teaching people something! Here are a few comments we received just during that one workday (edited only for spelling/punctuation clarity):
- "Thanks so much for the prompt reply. I think my son will love the NerdKit!
- "I just sent in my payment. Thanks for your help! Merry Christmas!"
- "Thank you for the prompt response and suggestions. I found another alternative that worked for me that you may be able to offer others in the future..."
- "I bought this for my 11 year old daughter who owns a soldering iron and is not afraid to use it."
- "Hello Mike, Wow -- that was a quick response!"
- "Thanks Mike. You guys are the best."
- "We are very new to NerdKits and I am very excited as this is something my son has wanted to work on for a long time... Thanks a lot for your help. We look forward to being part of this community."
These are mainly from the questions I handled, and I'm sure that Humberto has his own set from the day.
Every day is a mix of nuts-and-bolts execution, forward-looking brainstorming and planning, and technical work. That variety certainly contributes to making this an exciting and enjoyable way to spend a workday. Finally, the feedback from our students (customers) is a constant reminder of the impact we're having as teachers (small business owners). So, to my friends and family, I hope this helps you have a better understanding of what I do on a daily basis, and to the readers who have ever thought about starting their own business or taking their existing projects full-time, I hope you find yourself with a bit more clarity about where that path can take you.
