One of the things that people have often asked me is, "You're so smart... Why don't you just start your own business?" While I haven't gotten this question recently (which comes of not having new people to talk to most likely), it has come up often enough to be annoying. The simple answer that I give is that I just haven't thought of something to do that's worth going into business doing.
And, in reality, there's a much deeper truth buried in there. And the truth is annoying because, speaking immodestly, I'm certainly at least as smart as most of the dot-bomb millionaires. So why don't I start my own business.
So the answer remains - because I don't have a good idea of what to start a business doing. Systems development (and other related areas) tend to break down into two separate areas: problem space and solution space. (Ok, it's a lot more areas than that, but I'm just concerned with these two for the moment.) Problem space is the "what" and solution space is the "how". A classic example would be: problem - put a man on the moon and bring him back alive; solution - build rockets and landers and space suits and all the other stuff necessary.
I spend most of my time firmly in solution space. I like coming up with interesting, elegant, and simple ways to solve problems. You start describing a problem or a set of requirements and I'm already off and running, thinking about how it could be built and what else would need to be done. I'm good at it and, more importantly, what I design has a strong tendency to be right.
<tangent> When I first joined AT&T, I started out on the project as a Unix systems administrator. However, given my development background, I was quickly helping out in design and planning meetings. It quickly became apparent that what was being built was going to have some problems. Too much of the control logic was concentrated in the wrong places and there was way too much that was being left to "everything working just right". (I'm being excessively vague here because I believe I'm still under a non-disclosure, so I really can't be specific.)
On my own initiative, I drew up a redesign plan that would support what we needed to do. It was nicely modular and was based on the technology we were working with at the time. I ran through all the expansion, scalability and failure scenarios in my head and came up with a winner each time. So, I went to my manager to try and start people thinking about a redesign. She was quite happy and suggested that I get more people involved. So I had a meeting (welcome to corporate America) and started hitting strong resistance.
I'll freely admit that I was young and cocky. I was still the youngest person on the team. So the resistance that I was hitting was because people needed to be convinced that the idea had merit. This was the first time that I'd suddenly realized, full-force, that people just couldn't think through a problem or a design the way I could. It was a sobering (and intensely frustrating) experience. They needed to be led, step by careful step, through before they could understand what I was saying. And, since I'd had the temerity to put forth a design without getting everyone's buy-in first, I was also wrong. After all, I was younger and couldn't know what would work.
To shorten this story down, my design idea was eventually rejected. We were too far down the current path and needed to proceed. However, in an unpleasant footnote to this whole thing, we ran into significant trouble about 8 months after that. Due to some technical, personnel, and management issues, we needed to rethink the approach we were taking. Another group was given the responsibility to put together the command-and-control logic. So they did a redesign (I was not involved and they had not heard of my ideas). Their result looked amazingly like mine. The only differences were based on the different technology we were using and the implications that arose from that. So, a year after I designed it, someone else did the same design and we implemented that one. </tangent>
So what does any of this have to do with starting a business? It's simply a longer way of saying, "I don't know what to go into business doing." My one foray into starting a business was to do some programming consulting back in the late 1980s. And the one thing that I definitively learned from that is that to do consulting, you have to have contacts. I didn't have contacts (and still largely don't have any) so it wasn't a good business for me to go into. And, somehow, I don't think the general business description of "technical problem solver" would turn out the way I'd expect or hope.
If you've got any thoughts of a business I could start, or if you want to think about going into business with me, let me know... I'm looking for a good ground floor to start in on.
Author: ben@tmk.com