A long time Adviser/Mentor of mine, who also happens to be a very successful investor, sent me a link to the Venture Capital Human Capital (VCHC) report. The findings were interesting but not too surprising (except for possibly the average age of the founding team, given I founded my first company at the “didn’t know any better” age of 26) from my vantage point. I have embedded the report below so you should be able to scroll through the pages.
They say: “In part 1 of our first-ever Venture Capital Human Capital Report, we look at the race of founders, the racial composition of founding teams, age of founding teams and the # of founders of VC backed companies to see if there is any relationship between these characteristics and the VC funding received.” Some of their findings:
87% of Founders are White; All-Asian Teams Raise the Most Funding
Nationally, South Asian and East/Southeast Asians are funded to a similar extent
83% of Teams are all White. All Asian teams raise more money.
Average founding team is age 35 to 44 years old.
39% of founders were CEO/Founders before. Sales/Marketing and Product Management/Development were common previous roles.
Majority of companies have two or more founders, but a third are led by one founder.
I saw the movie Salt yesterday with a friend and it was intense. A good action/thriller with Angelina Jolie as the main character. She plays a CIA agent who is set up by Russian agents to infiltrate American intelligence, but she doesn’t know this about herself until she’s much older. Of course the bad guys always underestimate the power of true love to destroy even the most evil plots and plans. The stunts and effects were really good. However, as skinny as Angelina is, some of those stunts and fights with men twice her size are even harder to believe…but hey, it’s just a movie. My friend and I left the theater pumped with adrenaline, and we both concluded that the way the movie ended there was probably going to be a Salt II.
We decided to grab some dinner and headed over to Baby Acapulco’s which is just across the street from the theater. We were pleasantly surprised with the band who was playing that night – The Brew. They play Latin Jazz music and they were really good. She had heard of them before and I wasn’t sure if I had. We both enjoyed a margarita and the show! They even had a free group salsa lesson that I participated in despite the fact I was wearing flip flops. I’d love to take salsa or almost any kind of dance lessons some day so it was a fun experience. A bunch of us lined up in front of the stage and my practice partner ended up being another woman who was there supporting the band so she already knew how to dance salsa. She was older than me and really sweet. She just got back from Hawaii and was wearing a pretty flower in her hair. We took turns being the man in the practice sessions as did others because it was mostly women who came up to participate in the free lesson.
The Brew has a sound similar to the Gipsy Kings so beautiful and romantic. Musicians are entrepreneurs and I’m always impressed when I see a band who is able to seemingly make a living sharing their talent. To me, hearing them after watching Salt was a nice way to calm the nerves after watching an intense movie! I look forward to hearing them again sometime soon.
Yesterday after I checked out facebook and updated my profile picture to one of my daughter wearing a flamenco dress that I bought her during my recent trip to Barcelona where I got to explore a little bit of my poetic side, I began thinking about people’s images. I like facebook because I can see what is going on with friends & family who are all over the world. I check it once every couple of weeks…sometimes once per week depending on the notifications I get. I set all my privacy settings so that only the people in my network can see my pictures, comments, etc. I used to use twitter almost daily but in the last year, my usage has decreased drastically. Most of my tweets are just my automatic tweets when I publish a blog post. Even the frequency of my blog posting has decreased mostly because of lack of time, I haven’t been inspired to write, and I’m writing more offline. LinkedIn is another site that I’ve checked out periodically.
The reason I started using twitter was first because I had wanted everyone to know I had gone to a Duran Duran concert, and then more importantly to see what it could do for my business Babble Soft, that is now run by Nicole Johnson, who was my business partner and who thankfully was able to take over the company and run with it. Twitter is a valuable tool to meet people and get the word out about your business. Most of what I tweeted was pretty upbeat or business related.
As I was looking at some facebook pages (mine included), it’s clear that what we show online and often what we show people even in “real” life isn’t really what’s going on with us. We often show a rosy picture with glamorous photos of us or our kids/family smiling, and we tweet about events or fun things. There are a few crazies out there who let it all hang out, but soon they are ostracized even online. Sometimes even those closest to us in real life don’t really know what’s going on with us because we’ve been told it’s not good to share too much of the hard, ‘real’ stuff. So we stuff it inside or say to ourselves ‘who cares’ or ‘I’ll get over it.’ I agree in one sense that we should keep some stuff to ourselves if we can (but sometimes as crazy as it sounds we just can’t), but I’ve also discovered that not sharing at all, which is what I used to do, meant that people didn’t really know me and after I started sharing things like others shared with me, I realized how strange things sometimes sounded. When I started talking and writing, I and others started to hear and see me differently. Even the greatest writers of all time couldn’t tell us explicitly through their writing what they were processing because of social pressures, which is part of what makes their writing so provocative!
Social networks enabled millions of people to share things about themselves…their daily lives that in some ways validated the mundane lives we often live. I used to share things about where I was going or notes on events, etc. Thankfully not things like people joked about (i.e., going to the bathroom)! But people shared, continue to share, and make connections to individuals they might not have otherwise in a mostly safe environment. twitter is a fire hose, or as I like to describe it a river, of information sharing.
Social networks have given people a medium to be heard and you cannot argue with the fact that it has fundamentally changed the way many people interact with each other and think of each other. Tools like twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn have brought customers, job seekers, stay-at-home parents, entrepreneurs, and companies closer together and it has shown a very large side of humanity that craves attention & connection that they apparently weren’t/aren’t getting in their real, offline lives.
I think we will see and are seeing an auto-correction on the use of these tools, but I believe these kinds of human connection tools are here to stay. When you tap into an aspect of someone or a group of people that needs/wants to be heard, they can often overdo it, spin out of control and then just like in the financial and political markets there will eventually be an auto correction that when it happens seems huge and out of control in a different way. Although markets are supposed to behave rationally, just like people who drive them, they often don’t.
I still remember this guy I knew at a Southern Baptist church I went to during junior high and high school. He was older (i.e. in college), wiser, and I think he was one of our Sunday school teachers. I looked up to him and adored him. There was so much going on in my life that I wanted to share with him pieces of it and get his advice, yet I couldn’t because I felt if I did he would think differently of me. Like most teenagers, I already felt I was different enough. I remember sitting with him somewhere alone trying to tell him something that seemed so ominous at the time and now is just a fact of my life, and I think because he could sense my angst he said ‘some things are better off left unsaid.’ I suddenly felt relieved because it took off the pressure, and gave me a sense that he understood, but it still left me feeling the same, different person.
So, yes some things are better off left unsaid except for when they aren’t. If by saying them online, offline, to people you trust, to people you don’t know if you can trust, you find a kindred soul, someone who can help you figure it out, or someone who changes you or your path for the better, or even realize that you really aren’t that different because there are other people out there kind of like you, then it’s better to say it and take the risk. Unless of course you are saying & texting things like Tiger Woods. 🙂 You certainly learn who you can and can’t trust when you are at your most vulnerable.
But when you consciously or unconsciously take that risk, it will have an affect on your online image and/or your real life image. The type of affect (positive or negative) will depend on what’s going on around you and how you deal with the aftermath. It’s important to manage your online and real life image/reputation but if you over manage it, no one really knows the real person like Bernie Madoff, who everyone thought was a great guy…until they didn’t.
The first year of the new Magellan International School (MIS), founded by the father of my kids (Erin Defosse), is almost over. And it was a really great year! I always believed in the vision of the school when Erin first told me he wanted to start it. It has been a phenomenal entrepreneurial success and it was wonderful to see the kids at their end of school year performance speaking in Spanish. I remember when I first met Erin how impressed I was that he was fluent in Spanish and often told him he should use the language more often since it was such an asset. I can understand about 60% of what people say in Spanish now. During my recent trip to Portugal (See post 1 and post 2) and Spain (will do a post soon) I was able to get by with my limited Spanish in Spain. Portuguese has some similar words to Spanish so I could pick up some of what people were talking about. I wish I knew other language other than English, but I don’t. My parents know two other languages but they don’t really have the opportunity to use those languages much since they aren’t commonly spoken.
I couldn’t argue with giving our kids the gift of another language and only hope they will take every opportunity to use it when they grow older. My son has already helped me on occasion communicate with someone who only speaks Spanish. It makes me so happy that he can help me translate!
Erin and the head of school, Marisa Leon, have done an amazing job getting the school off the ground. I remember meeting/interviewing Marisa in a Thai restaurant in downtown Austin, Texas and knowing immediately that she was the right person to head the school. She has a great mixture of the ability to communicate with parents and children which is so important in a school. I trust her and my kid’s other teachers completely with our kids.
MIS started the school year with about 45 students and ended with about 65. Next school year is anticipated to start with 100+ students! Plus, next year the students will start learning Mandarin! The amount of work it takes to get something like a successful, private school going is tremendous. Although I wasn’t involved in the day to day of getting the school off the ground, I did play a supporting role even if people didn’t see or know what I did, and I don’t believe it’s my place to say how and what I did as well as the sacrifices/compromises we made as a family to make it happen. All entrepreneurial endeavors require strategic resource allocations (time, money, etc.), but I can say confidently that I did gave birth to the two kids who inspired him to build the school…and I think that is a visible contribution that counts for something. 🙂
Although Erin and I are no longer married, I have always believed in his ability to make the school successful. Our kids are very happy there and the teachers are all world class and caring. They have worked with us during our family transition and have kept the kids as their number one priority which means the world to me. When my kids are happy, I’m happy or shall I say happier than I would be otherwise!
This quote was in an article that hit my in box today: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” The quote was in an email that was referencing a post done by Copyblogger called Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well and is mentioned in his book Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Amazon link).
For some reason it reminded me of times when people talk about scar tissue as badges of honor in the world of technology entrepreneurship. A lot of shit happens behind the scenes of a start-up company. One in 10 make it big and most of the rest of them have some modicum of success or get to 2nd base or fail. But in those other 9, a lot of practicing, a lot of learning, a lot of scarring occurs that make the next iterations closer to masterpieces. Many successful entrepreneurs (and investors for that matter) I’ve met have a few ‘bad deals’ or shall we say deals that didn’t go as well as they would have liked under their belts. The masterpieces are created because of the ‘pages of shit.’ Without those pages, experiences, and scars the masterpiece’s wouldn’t have happened. This is true in music, writing, entrepreneurship, sports, etc.
Just think about how many baskets Michael Jordan must have missed in order to make as many as he did. Unfortunately, in the world of start-up businesses we can’t physically (time, money, etc.) get up to bat or shoot at the basket that many times. So we have to get through the pages of shit and heal fast so we can hopefully create some masterpieces.
This evening I went down to the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge for South by Southwest Interactive and check out the Big Ass Twitter Happy Hour at Frank Hot Dogs and Cold Beer. I got the Chicago dog and a cranberry vodka because I don’t drink beer. The hot dog was pretty good but the drink tasted well nothing like cranberry or vodka. I got there kind of late and realized that since I’ve been so out of the social media scene this past year and rarely tweeted, that I really didn’t know a whole lot of the new twitter crowd. There were a few of us early adopters there, and I caught up with them before getting my badge. I thought briefly about going to the Austin High Tech Happy Hour but by the time I drove by where it was, the crowd had thinned so I drove on by and came back home. It was an early night.
SXSW interactive doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but they opened registration up tonight and it’s a good thing because the line was already quite long. So it was an uneventful Day 0. Tomorrow should be more interesting since I have some business meetings set up for the morning, more people I know would have flown in, the bloggers lounge should be open, and I will get to drink a caipirinha and eat some cheese bread on the roof top of Fogo de Chao (Brazilian Churrascaria), where the Austin Technology Incubator hosts the invite only third annual Entrepreneur’s Lounge.
So now to part 2 – the Love series by @gapingvoid. Check out Part 1 on Entrepreneurs. In this post, I’m linking to some of Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter cartoons that highlight my favorite of his Valentine’s 2010 love series. These particular cartoons touched me. He has a way of taking words and using color, lines, space, and feeling in a unique way. Please click on the image to go check out how to buy a print.
I liked the first one because it made me think of term sheets and love at the same time. As an entrepreneur, when you raise money, you are presented with a term sheet (or create one yourself) and you negotiate terms until you come to an agreement with the person giving you money. This cartoon to me represented yearning with a clear stated desire of wanting to be with someone while being vulnerable and trusting enough to let them name their terms.
The second one rings true to me because you know when you meet someone who is passionate about what they are doing or the story they are telling, you feel the love. The stories and the people who you tend to remember most exude passion and love. All great stories and works of art have love involved. What would the human condition be without love?
As for the last one, I just thought it was very cute and reminded me of being young, shy and having a school girl crush on someone. As a little kid, I was naturally outgoing but was shy as a pre-teen and teenager, but I have always deep down been a very passionate person. I never felt like I could express my passion legitimately through my writing and singing when I was younger for a variety of ‘life logistics,’ support, and inspiration reasons. But now I’m discovering that not feeling safe to express it, pretending to be someone you are not, or going through the motions for so long leaves one empty and longing for more. I became less shy externally as I got older, but that shy girl is still in there and she’s working on being brave about love!
A short, but important, interruption to my blogging break for the benefit of the earthquake victims in Haiti. The Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Central Texas is coordinating a fund raising effort among technology entrepreneur’s to raise money for the victims in Haiti. Even if you aren’t a technology entrepreneur or don’t work for a technology company, you can donate! 🙂
The Austin Startup blog did a great post about this today is copied below.
“If you haven’t yet donated to help out the victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, or even if you have and can offer a little bit more, Austin Ventures and the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas are providing a way to double your donation. They are calling upon Central Texas tech companies, their employees and friends to provide assistance to the rescue efforts in Haiti, and have established a $600,000 High-Tech HelpHaiti Fund to match donations.
You can donate at a website set up by the Entrepreneurs Foundation at http://www.GiveToAustin.org/HelpHaiti. The $600,000 contributed to match the contributions has been donated by Austin Ventures, Donna & Philip Berber, Dave & Isabel Welland, MFI Foundation, the Garber Family, Silicon Labs and the Entrepreneurs Foundation.
“The Austin entrepreneurial community is a tightly-knit group from which we all benefit. It is important that we use this great bond to mobilize and help others in time of need. The tragedy in Haiti is one of these times for us to step up,” said Phil Siegel of Austin Ventures, who is also chairing the committee to distribute the donations. Also serving on the committee are MFI Foundation’s Lynn Meredith, Glimmer of Hope Founder, Philip Berber, Silicon Labs founder Dave Welland and Eugene Sepulveda, CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation.
The committee has already wired $250,000 to two groups that are assisting directly with the efforts in Haiti, choosing to immediately donate what they could now rather than waiting to match the contributions of the Tech community. Austin Startup encourages all of Austin’s entrepreneurs and members of the tech community to give to the HelpHaiti fund in whatever amount you can.
Everyone has heard the word passion. It’s written about in business books, in fiction books, in poems, in romance novels, etc.. It’s shown on TV and in the movies when people find their true loves or their calling in life. But what is it? In the world of entrepreneurship, people tell you in order to be successful you must be passionate about what you are doing. I’ve run into a lot of people who appear passionate about what they are doing but they don’t always succeed in the way they expected. Passion ebbs and flows in most everything in life. Sometimes you are in love with your business and sometimes you aren’t, but in order to survive like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, etc. the passion must be there, the underlying love for your products, people, and company must be there and the gaps between must not be long.
They say true passion can be traced back to childhood, when everything seemed possible. My son is passionate about soccer and hanging out with his good buddies. If it was up to him, he’d be kicking around a soccer ball all day long. I often have to tell him not to kick the soccer ball in the main part of the house. If we’d let him, he’d probably sleep with his soccer ball. If you mention one of his friend’s names, he will incessantly ask us when we are going to see him next. He’s a bit of a socialite like his mom.
I can’t tell what my daughter is passionate about yet, but I think she has an affinity for music and lip gloss. We have a keyboard in our house that my father gave us and she tends to gravitate to it and punch the keys from time to time. And she likes to play the bowling game on the Wii.
My husband is passionate about starting the multi-lingual, international Magellan School here in Austin. He is passionate about his kids learning Spanish since he is fluent in Spanish and wants them to have the gift of multiple languages that was given to him. He is also passionate about biking and exercising. He set a goal to do the Shiner Bash – 100 mile ride and he did it. He exercises every day and he says he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life.
What a blessing it must be to discover your passion and find yourself being able to realize your goals. It’s even better when you can make a living at it. It seems like most people can’t turn their passion into making a living for whatever reasons whether it be timing, market acceptance, encouragement, money, health, ability, skills, etc. Many people try to keep their passion alive on the side or after some time, we forget what it was we were passionate about.
Right now in my life, I’m most passionate about my kids. I am passionate about helping people achieve more than they thought they could. When I look back upon my childhood, I remember the passion I had for music. I think my father actually started taking us to piano lessons when I was about 9 years old when we lived in Albuquerque, NM. When we moved to Lubbock, TX , I sought out my own piano teacher who lived nearby and I would walk to her house for lessons. It was hard to find time to practice and hard to find time to continue since it was just me, my mom, and my sister. My grandmother studied piano in Oxford University in England so I must get some of my passion for music from her. Sadly, I can’t play the piano today, but I can sing.
I sang in church and actually did a solo in front of the entire church in my early teens. I sang in high school choir. I sought out my own voice teacher and when I went to college at UT Austin, I took voice courses for two semesters. I knew I was reasonably good, but not great. I never envisioned myself singing in a musical or singing opera so I guess I thought what’s the point and continued on with my business degree. In grad school I sang a few songs in a couple of bands.
I also remembered that I liked to write. In my early teens, a few girlfriends and I would start this notebook with a story and each of us would have to write the next part until we ended up with a full story. I hate to admit this, but I think Michael Jackson and his glove showed up a time or two in those stories. 🙂 I wonder what happened to those notebooks. I would also invariably get high grades in creativity in my English classes but very low grades in grammar. The concept of grammar didn’t click for me until my freshman English class in college for some reason.
I also didn’t have anyone around me encouraging me, connecting me with people, giving me feedback, or showing me the way to nurture those creative right brain activities I was drawn to. So I did what any respectable child of two doctors would do….I got an Accounting degree and then an MBA, which has served me well and odds are has resulted in a much more lucrative career than if I had pursued writing, singing or horse back riding (another younger days hobby of mine) as a career.
So now here I am in mid-life. Too old to start up regular horse back riding again for fear of breaking my bones…well not really, but not enough time to go to a barn and take care of a horse. It’s highly unlikely that I can make singing a financially rewarding career at this point in my life, but I am enjoying my voice lessons and relish any time I can make it to a jam session. I do enjoy writing in my blog.
So that leaves me to figure out how best to blend my passion for working with people, with a product I’m passionate about, with a path to millions of dollars….
Any suggestions? How did you discover your passion?
Last night I attended the first ever Austin Technology Incubator Bioscience Open House! I’ve been extra busy this week since the previous night I also served as a panelist at the TiE Austin Funding Forum.
The open house was a HUGE success with close to 150 people in attendance at the AT&T Conference center located on The University of Texas at Austin campus. The event was held in an outside area and despite the wind, everyone seemed to have a great time.
The event brought together entrepreneurs, VCs, healthcare professionals, and hospital representatives. It was was partly sponsored by Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin.
I was feeling a little anti-social last night for a variety of reasons including information and emotional overload, so I was more than happy to hang with Stephany and Laura eating tortilla chips, 7 layer dip, and mini-hamburgers…oh and drink a couple of glasses of vinto tinto. 🙂 They kept me entertained, and I helped with registering people and even validating parking from time to time. Being near the check in process, I got to meet most everyone who came and went anyway.
I ventured out into the crowd to say ‘hello’ to a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, make some key connections, and to see Jessica speak.
ATI Bioscience is a fairly new program (about a year old) and is definitely building a great foundation to help grow Austin’s Bio community!
Last night I participated in annual event put on by TiE Austin called The Funding Forum. I participated last year as a reviewer to help teams prepare for their pitches and as a last minute panelist to review pitches. This year I was a panelist listening to pitches but was kind of a moderator too.
The companies rotate tables and pitch their ideas via their PC or hardcopy PowerPoint slides to a few potential investors. Many angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, and members from the technology startup community are present.
At my table, we had 4 different companies. One of them had already come in to the Austin Technology Incubator to present so I was familiar with them. Two of them had very nice, well thought out presentations and a did a good job presenting their ideas. One of the presenters was not very well prepared.
It’s a great place for new entrepreneurial teams to practice their pitch and get advice from experienced individuals. Some take feedback gracefully and some don’t.
One of the investors at my table had funded a company he met at a prior Funding Forum so it seems to work, on occasion, as it’s designed to!
I left just after the company pitches ended for a variety of reasons, with one of them being that I started to wonder if I was truly in the right space-time continuum.
As Thanksgiving 2008 fades into pleasant memories, I came to ponder (as I often do) how a mere thought can rule our hours and days. Most of our thoughts are about our work, our family, our daily obligations, and as we get older maybe about the meaning of our lives.
Some thoughts are fleeting and some are recurring…causing us smiles, tears, pain, joy, or angst. Some recurring thoughts get pushed aside by the ordinariness of our every day lives. Some keep coming back and no matter how hard we try to dismiss them, they seem impossible to get rid of and ironically the pleasant thoughts often flee our minds more quickly than the uncomfortable ones.
For those of us who don’t have the mental strength of mind to ignore/squash/bury our thoughts without being thrown into a state of mental anguish, it can result in frequent bouts of disequilibrium. Those of us who seek to quiet the disequilibrium are often labeled as entrepreneurs. It’s not easy being an entrepreneur as we are often trying to solve things that may be unsolvable in our current place in the space-time continuum. Yet still we try.
I and many others have and continue to have these strong thoughts. In the past when I’ve followed those thoughts that surface and don’t leave me alone, I have learned from them, been able to help others, and barely lived to tell the tale.
“Life is about learning.” That in itself is a profound and already well worn thought carved in the minds of sages, prophets, and philosophers who came long before us. Yet each time that thought surfaces, I fear it. I fear what it is foreshadowing and despite having conquered that fear many times before, the differences between each ‘learning’ seem so vast.
So, how do we rule our thoughts instead of our thoughts ruling us? Or maybe the question is can we accomplish this in this lifetime? In this body? In this experience?
Oh what power our thoughts have on the direction we step in our lives…whether it’s right, left, backward, straight, or directly into stardust…into our dreams.
I had to talk myself off the entrepreneurial ledge yesterday. Of course there is the often publicized glamour of entrepreneurship and then there is the unsung story of the not so glamorous side. I think most entrepreneurs are a little bit neurotic, myself included, so when I heard that the first company I was founding CEO of officially shut down recently, I entered a state of…well I still haven’t figured out what state that is.
The company was alive for 11 years. For 11 years it provided experience, salaries, products and services to employees and customers. I left in 2001 and my husband, Erin, who was the CTO left in 2003, and we have had nothing to do with the day to day operations since. But the profound affect it has had on me cannot be reduced to mere words. In many ways, it was like my first child (without the diaper changing). It was a difficult parting of ways for me both personally and professionally.
I knew a few good people who were still there and through the years they have reached out to me to help them find another job or share their experiences about working there. Good people came and went. Some bad ones came and went and some bad ones stayed, but overwhelmingly greatness was among us. I heard about the company shutting down a few weeks ago but just mentioned it to a group of college friends on an email group I’ve been a part of since 1995 (pre-social networking sites for people who love mushrooms, pre-blogging, pre-twitter). I had convinced one of the guy’s in the group to join us for the journey and he replied by saying this:
Aruni – I know I’ve poked at you and Isochron since I left but I have to say it was the best business class I could have taken. This piece of Oil Field Trash was polished quite a bit while in Austin. I do want to thank you and Erin for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it. From that trial I learned sooooo much. I’m not sure I ever put it together sufficiently for you guys to know what the experience meant for me. Thanks! You and Erin were a rock I could depend on during my time in Austin as well. It meant a lot.
When I read his note on my phone before going in to an invitation only IBM Women Entrepreneur’s Webcast event held at IBM, the flood gates cracked a little. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot so I had to pull myself together and go in. The rest of the day I was on edge and I still am.
I had to walk into my day job after the IBM Webcast and deal with bureaucracy, with people wanting 5 approvals to get something done, with collections, with employee allocations, and with being extremely underpaid because I’m doing much more than I was hired to do. I had to suspend reality to make it through the day. I repeated to myself “floodgates don’t open at work” over and over. If I was a man and punched the wall, it would be more acceptable. I had a “What am I doing with my life?” moment. I had a “I’m working for ‘the man,’ I have two kids, I’ve been married for 7 years, we have a house and car payment, I have to keep our insurance benefits, our savings have sunk due to the crazy economic situation, and I feel trapped” moment.
I had already committed to guest lecture at an executive MBA class yesterday evening so I went in not knowing what would come out of my mouth. I shared the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and received several questions about Babble Soft and my day job. I was surprised at how calm I felt giving my talk given the emotional roller coaster I had been riding all day. One of the students took my card and said he wanted to see if he could help me get introduced to someone for a possible opportunity for Babble Soft.
I also happened to receive an email through facebook from one of my former students (I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin) who happens to be expecting a baby. He sent me a link to a new book by Randy Komisar who wrote The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (a book I made required reading in my class) called This I Believe. Komisar writes about the Deferred Life Plan and how we make excuses about not doing what we want to do and putting off things until the time is right.
So despite all of that, I talked myself off the entrepreneurial ledge because I live in the real world. The real world is where I have two beautiful children who smile and laugh. A world where I tell my son after he ate a big dinner tonight that he was a ‘hungry hippo’ and he immediately replies and says in a comedian (trying to make his voice sound deep) tone “There’s a Hungry Hippo in the House!” My daughter laughs, and I look at him with a smile on my face and know instantly he got his sense of humor from me. 8)
So I take solace from some words my day job boss told me the other day. When I asked him why he wanted to hire me he said ‘because he heard I was a natural entrepreneur and he wanted one on staff.’ When I thought about those words later in the day, my soul said ‘thank you grandpa’ because he is who I gained my natural entrepreneurial tendencies from…I just happen to be a woman girl.
I hope both my children will be able to express themselves throughout their lives in ways I was never able to in the past but aspire to in the future.
The following is a guest post by a friend and fellow entrepreneur Julie Fergerson. We met several years ago while each of us was in the middle of our very own first high tech start-up. Julie is currently a VP at Debix. Debix provides services to help you monitor your credit. My husband and I signed up a while ago, and we recently signed up our kids. We were at her daughter’s 5 year old birthday party that she mentions below. We just got the results back for our kids who were part of a batch of 83 kids that were evaluated. Thank goodness our kids are safe but 3 of those kids had compromised credit. Check out Julie’s post below to learn more about how to protect your children’s identities.
Are Your Children’s Identities Safe?
Hi, my name is Julie and I am a mother of two little kids, age 2 and 5. I am also an executive at Debix, the Identity Protection Network, and have been chasing criminals and stopping fraud over the past decade. Recently, I helped design a new product to protect children’s identities. As usual with any new product launch (July 28th, 2008), I asked my friends at my daughter’s fifth birthday party to enroll and give me feedback on what they thought.
I was stunned to find that two of the fourteen children at the party (age 4 and age 9) had someone else using their identities. This hit so close to home that I decided to research the size of the problem.
So we scanned 500 children who were under the age of 18, and found that 1 in 20 kids (5%) already have someone else using their social security number. To put that in perspective, that means about one kid in every classroom in the US is a victim of identity theft. Worse yet, the average child victim had over $12,000 in debt and 12% of the child victims are age 5 and younger – shocking!
To ensure the results were accurate we hired Javelin Strategy and Research, a top-tier analyst firm to analyze the results and report their conclusions. You can download the research report here: www.debix.com/research.
As I talk about this problem with other Moms, the first question is always, “what does it mean that their kid is a victim of identity theft?” It means the child will not be able to use his credit when he needs it for things as important as college loans, first apartments or even a first job. As part of my research I met Lindsey, a college student at Texas State, who is living this problem. When she applied for her first internship competing against 400 other candidates, she was thrilled when she got the job and received the company welcome gift. Unfortunately a few weeks later, she received a letter rescinding her job offer – she was told she was not hirable because someone else was using her social security number. After what she calls “a full time job” of working to clear her name for six months, she was able to restore her identity and get the job.
The next question I get is “how can this happen? Surely companies know the social security number belongs to a kid.” The answer is no. There is no system in place to warn companies and the Social Security Administration does not publish a database of social security numbers with names and ages of kids. The social security administration has a formula for issuing a social security number, but you can’t tell the difference between a number that was issued to a 39 year old immigrant to the US and a newborn. About all you can tell from the number is the year and location it was issued (check out SSA Algorithm for issuing SSNs.)
It is our job as parents to protect our children and give them every possible advantage when they become an adult. We have to protect our kids as best we can so when they start out they have a clean record and aren’t starting adult life at a disadvantage.
I never thought I’d be that excited about a printer, but here I am writing about one. The main reason it’s so exciting to write about this one is because I got it free! That’s like getting $350 (including ink) of stuff you can really use!
I bet you are wondering why I got it free. Well it’s because I (@aruni) and Barbara Jones are both on twitter. Barbara runs a company called One2One Network – The Women’s Word of Mouth Marketing Network and she discovered me on twitter and began following me a while back.
OK, it’s not just because I’m on twitter, but part of getting lucky is being somewhere where people are looking for people like you. So she probably thought since I write reasonably well in English and my blog is read by many entrepreneurially minded women, men, moms, and dads, that my experience with the printer might provide an interesting perspective.
When she first asked me if I’d like an Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer, I tweeted back something like “heck yeah!” I then told my husband and he being the one that manages our home IT set-up as well as being our resident rocket scientist, was immediately skeptical. First he grumbled “Well, what’s wrong with our current HP Photosmart 3210 All-in-One” that we’ve had for a few years. The only response I could meekly muster was that the scanning feature didn’t work well. He then asked if it was network ready (not just wireless…it had to be able to be plugged into with an Ethernet connection). He also said it had to be Mac compatible. Of course Barbara cheerfully tweeted it met all of those requirements. She was probably wondering why I was looking a gift horse in the mouth or at minimum what kind of man I was married to.
When it arrived and he opened the box, he took one look at the design and features and cracked a half smile (a rare occurrence when it comes to technical items – unless it’s a new Mac, Blackberry, or other Apple product) and said “You did good.” I nodded knowingly thinking to myself ‘don’t I always!‘ 🙂
He set it up and the last few weeks we’ve been using it for a variety of things from printing work related stuff, to kid’s birthday cards, maps, to scanning documents. I have to say I’m impressed and here are the top 5 reasons why:
My husband was impressed making it easier to get it installed and tested!
It has a document feeder just like a copier. This is such a *HUGE* feature for scanning or copying multiple pages. I no longer have to put one page down, open the lid, put another page down, etc. I just set the pages I want to scan or copy on the top and press a few buttons. It also scans to .pdf which I love!
It’s Mac compatible (see also item #1 above)
It’s WiFi and Ethernet ready (see also item #1 above) [Interesting side note: the Wi-Fi Alliance is headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator, which is where I work during the day]
The design is very cool, modern, and sleek and fits perfectly on top of my little file cabinet. It has a touch screen front interface for one touch copy and scanning.
The only issue I’ve had with it is printing pages with heavy color and that’s probably because we use newspaper cheap paper. A few months ago (for some cheap wad/had a coupon unknown reason) I bought a case of Office Depot premium multipurpose paper and it’s pretty thin. I think I just began printing on it using the HP and now with the deep colors in the Epson, the pages sometimes come out feeling wet. I changed the setting to draft but then it kind of dulls the color. I guess I’ll have to suffer through some wet pages until I finish this case of cheap paper!
So, although inertia (and the economy) might have prevented me from replacing our HP printer, I can honestly say that the ability to scan multiple pages easily would have swung me over to the Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer side of the camp quite some time ago.
(Amazon link).
Last night I attended the first ever 
(a book I made required reading in my class) called 
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