First Time CEO

If you’re trying to be “take over the world, but do no evil” successful, it turns out there’s a company that you should know about. That, of course, is Google.

They probably referred you to this blog, changed your life in the last 10 years, and have the potential to change the world (if they haven’t already). Fortunately David A. Vise and Mark Malseed spent extended periods of their lives on teaching us exactly how Google started, including everything from Burning Man, to company culture, to IPO.

The book does a great job showing exactly which elements attributed to their success and lends many great advice points for running your own business, such as never settling for anything less than what you expect. And to put yourself and your company in a situation where others are interested in you. Having the upper hand in the VC process kept the Google founders in control of the company, and even allowed them to change the way Wall Street IPOs had been done for years.

Don’t read this book if you want information about anything later than Gmail, though. Although there has been an updated edition, it is not much more current than the first story. You’ll find plenty of information about adwords, pagerank, search, and changing the way we know the internet. But, you will not find anything about Google’s current war with Microsoft (Google OS, and Bing, that is), or Google Analytics, or Wave, or any of the crazy Google products that we know them for today.

Regardless, there’s a lot to learn. So go pick up the book.

Amazon: The Google Story: For Google’s 10th Birthday

I’ve been trying to start a business all summer, to no avail. All I was trying to undertake was a computer training service. My intent was just to make some money on the weekends to make my way through college.

What did I have to do? Step 1 (and probably the only step for quite a while) – create a flyer and post it around town. Total time: probably about 2 hours. 1 to create, 1 to post. If I applied some sort of strategy, I could up that to 3 hours.

How many hours did it take me? Weeks. I registered the company on 7/7. I didn’t create the flyer until yesterday, 7/21. That’s a solid two weeks of not doing one of the simplest things I’ve ever attempted in my life. Why? I didn’t know. And that, right there, was the root of the problem.

Uncertainty is dangerous. It freezes people in their tracks. Questions ran through my mind constantly: how do I even write a flyer? Will people want to call me if they read it? Will I even make enough money? Is there another way to find customers?

Now that I think about it, this wasn’t what I was asking myself. Asking any of these questions actually would have been beneficial. They all have direct answers: No, but I can figure out how to write a flyer. Someone’s bound to call. I won’t make any money unless I try. Yes, there are other ways to make money. If I get started, maybe I can try more than one (instead of NONE). 

What I was really asking myself was this: Am I going to be successful doing this? Try answering that question!

My problem, I found, is that I have an issue dealing with uncertainty. This occurs throughout my life. Where it holds me back the most, though, is in business. It’s not tangible uncertainty that’s the problem, though. If I know that there is uncertainty involved, that eliminates a whole level of uncertainty right there. I’m certain that I don’t know. Any of those specific questions would have been good for me. The correct answers are not certain, but there is certainly are answers.

Will I be successful? Where do I even begin. Maybe if I market well, but maybe I should run it better. But what if this idea isn’t the one I want. Am I even cut out to be a business person? Am I too young?

Yes, all this over a freakin’ flyer. I thought about this question without a path in mind, a plan in place, or any intention of getting out of bed in the morning to continue toward the goal of being successful. That’s what this general question was – a goal. I should have treated it as one.

Once I realized what the problem was – broad, un-actionable questions – I simply narrowed my questions. The flyer took me about 2 hours to design. It looked fabulous. It’s too bad about the plan, though.

I had a great slogan “Free Lessons at the Free Library” (yes, the library nearby is called the “Free Library” – kind of redundant, I know). Too bad the library didn’t have any place to post the flyer! Maybe if I hadn’t clouded my mind with excuses, I would have spent day 1 checking to see if I should make a flyer, and day 2 making it. Instead, of course, of wasting 3 weeks on the two tasks.

And that flyer taught me a business and life lesson. Be more specific, reduce uncertainty, and you can hinder procrastination. Always know the next actionable action, and understand it’s risks. Then go for it! Oh, and you can make a mean flyer if you just put your mind (and google) to it.

So it’s July 19. The first post went up February 12. That’s 5 months and a week. That’s horrible. It’s almost like I forgot about my the blog. Ok, yes. I forgot about the blog. Anyway, keep reading.

The reason why I’m back is because I’m stuck. If you read the February post, you can see that I was excited about grabbing a partner and finding this automated way of fixing computers. Yeah, of course, too good to be true. The supplier proved to be extremely unreliable with support (and, even worse, sales. When a company takes a week to get back to you on selling you something, you know there’s a problem). And it’s hard to keep a partner when neither of you are doing anything.

We’ve been through every plan in the book to start a business, and what I’m realizing right now is that there is nothing that I am passionate enough to start doing. Each time I’ve come up with a business idea, I’ve forgotten about it, lost excitement, gotten distracted, or been discouraged. Plus, my brain doesn’t help. What I’m excited about tonight, I won’t give a crap about tomorrow morning, let alone next week, or in 5 months and a week.

But what I have been doing this summer is reading. And learning.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount regarding running a business and self-improvement for the business-y type. This kind of stuff excites me, and, while apparently it doesn’t cause me to jump up and start a business, it does make me want to get up and tell people about what I learned!

So that’s why I’m here. To tell you what I’ve learned.

Stay tuned.

So you’ve stumbled upon our blog. Let me take a second to explain what’s going on here.

I have been running a computer “company” for a few years now. I call myself an entrepreneur, but I haven’t put the time into the company that I clearly would have needed to in order to make it something big. So, what’s changed?

I stumbled upon (no, I didn’t StumbleUpon it) some software that makes fixing computers a very automated task. It checks the system for errors, downloads windows files that it finds are corrupted, and rebuilds the system with the necessary files. One restart and almost any slow PC is fast again.

So after sitting on this new system for a month, I decided to involve my friend from college (Babson College, to be more specific) in the operation. The two of us, after failing to fully launch another business involving two other friends, are extremely excited to get this one off the ground.

The best part is that, since this will be our first taken-seriously business, we’re going to blog about what we’re learning along the way. You get to see it now, and we’ll be excited to see it later, once we’ve learned from so many mistakes.

I can’t promise the frequency of updates, but I can tell you that it will be worthwhile to subscribe to the RSS feed. If we don’t update the blog enough, or we update the blog too much, please let us know by posting a comment.

We would love to have a community feel for the site. Please. If you have learned something from us or want to give us advice or share an experience with the readers of the site, please leave us a comment. We may even feature it in one of our future posts.

Enjoy!