somniloquist
New Contributor
Hi,
I'm about 80% through TMF right now and decided to sign up for the forum on MJ's urging. The book is great.
I haven't looked around the forum yet - I figured I'd just make my intro first as I might want to refer back to it in some future conversations.
I'm 34 right now, and I graduated with a PhD in Human Genetics in 2008. I didn't pay for grad school -- we don't do that in the life sciences -- and was paid by the NIH and NSF to complete my degree. However, I wasn't paid well, and because I was feeling the pain of the impoverished student lifestyle, I started doing some "consulting" while I was a student. I put "consulting" in quotes because I've become aware that what I was really doing was contract work as a software engineer with a bit of specialized knowledge around genomics/bioinformatics.
I have always liked to tinker with new technologies, and view it as a hobby and the things I make as art projects. One day while I was a student, I decided to make a mobile web application for taking videos from YouTube and making them watchable on my cell phone. For context, this was when YouTube was just getting hot in the startup space, before the Google acquisition, and well before the iPhone. I managed to blog spam my way into getting a lot of media attention (TechCrunch, GigaOM, Der Spiegel), and a C&D/"Job offer" from YouTube. Heh 😀. In retrospect, I should have made a bigger media play, but I didn't -- lesson learned. I just kept doing product development as a hobby and put just enough attention on ad-revenues to eke out a small profit. I was later approached by AdMob (also pre-Google acquisition) about acquiring my small company, although the conversation didn't go very far. Fast-forward to early 2012, and with an unengaged bloated team, a "2.0" version of the product over budget and behind schedule, I didn't have any enthusiasm left. I'm in the process of liquidating/dissolving the corporation.
In 2010 I opened another small company, this time in the genomics/clinical informatics space. Like the company I started in grad school, this one was also bootstrapped, although this time on a contract from a major biotech equipment vendor that had recently acquired a new DNA sequencing platform. The context here was that my client wanted a skunkworks-style project spun up to do the heavy-duty computing required for genome analysis in "the cloud". So I built a team, partly in the US and partly in China (the latter location because I had been working with some oDesk engineers there before deciding to convert them to FT employees). Big mistake to hire employees. Colossal mistake to hire FT software engineers and open an office in China. Anyway, I delivered the package successfully, and as part of the handoff had a full-blown acquisition discussion with my client's finance/legal team. Prior to M&A, client had made the "job offer"-type buy-out I encountered in the YouTube/AdMob situation described above, but I opted to go the harder M&A route to get that experience. The acquisition ended up failing for a variety of reasons, mainly political and what was in my mind a grossly unfair set of contract terms/constraints. I still have this company open, and am currently seeking to license the technology, although I've been not doing much with it since early this year.
I realized that my career plan was not going very well, so I decided to take a breather, do some reading, try to relax and assess my situation. I'm doing some AI/statistics consulting at the moment with what look to be promising VC backed startups, and I have some equity there, but I'm honestly kind of missing the passion of having my own project.
I ended up here after a book recommendation for TMF from a friend. After having now played the leadership roles of VP Engineering, CTO, CEO, as well as engineer, marketer, gopher, and pretty much whatever else was needed, I'm getting a pretty good sense of where my strengths/weaknesses lie.
If I was to visualize the ideal outcome of participating in this forum, it would be to get some mentorship on how to build a vehicle for streamlined, solid growth. I'm really good with math, technology, and computer systems, but I have only vague notions of what all the parts of a highly-functional business are. Further, I see that building things in real-world time as opposed to internet-time takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my current perspective is that I don't have as much time or freedom to make mistakes on the business development side, as opposed to building product prototypes which I'm good enough at that I can just view as purely playtime.
In the short term, I want to either revive my mothballed company, or pivot it into a money tree with some new product/service I haven't conceived of yet. Longer term I'd like to have something even more lean and hands-off -- automated trading or the like.
I think that's enough for now. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your replies! 😀
-Allen
I'm about 80% through TMF right now and decided to sign up for the forum on MJ's urging. The book is great.
I haven't looked around the forum yet - I figured I'd just make my intro first as I might want to refer back to it in some future conversations.
I'm 34 right now, and I graduated with a PhD in Human Genetics in 2008. I didn't pay for grad school -- we don't do that in the life sciences -- and was paid by the NIH and NSF to complete my degree. However, I wasn't paid well, and because I was feeling the pain of the impoverished student lifestyle, I started doing some "consulting" while I was a student. I put "consulting" in quotes because I've become aware that what I was really doing was contract work as a software engineer with a bit of specialized knowledge around genomics/bioinformatics.
I have always liked to tinker with new technologies, and view it as a hobby and the things I make as art projects. One day while I was a student, I decided to make a mobile web application for taking videos from YouTube and making them watchable on my cell phone. For context, this was when YouTube was just getting hot in the startup space, before the Google acquisition, and well before the iPhone. I managed to blog spam my way into getting a lot of media attention (TechCrunch, GigaOM, Der Spiegel), and a C&D/"Job offer" from YouTube. Heh 😀. In retrospect, I should have made a bigger media play, but I didn't -- lesson learned. I just kept doing product development as a hobby and put just enough attention on ad-revenues to eke out a small profit. I was later approached by AdMob (also pre-Google acquisition) about acquiring my small company, although the conversation didn't go very far. Fast-forward to early 2012, and with an unengaged bloated team, a "2.0" version of the product over budget and behind schedule, I didn't have any enthusiasm left. I'm in the process of liquidating/dissolving the corporation.
In 2010 I opened another small company, this time in the genomics/clinical informatics space. Like the company I started in grad school, this one was also bootstrapped, although this time on a contract from a major biotech equipment vendor that had recently acquired a new DNA sequencing platform. The context here was that my client wanted a skunkworks-style project spun up to do the heavy-duty computing required for genome analysis in "the cloud". So I built a team, partly in the US and partly in China (the latter location because I had been working with some oDesk engineers there before deciding to convert them to FT employees). Big mistake to hire employees. Colossal mistake to hire FT software engineers and open an office in China. Anyway, I delivered the package successfully, and as part of the handoff had a full-blown acquisition discussion with my client's finance/legal team. Prior to M&A, client had made the "job offer"-type buy-out I encountered in the YouTube/AdMob situation described above, but I opted to go the harder M&A route to get that experience. The acquisition ended up failing for a variety of reasons, mainly political and what was in my mind a grossly unfair set of contract terms/constraints. I still have this company open, and am currently seeking to license the technology, although I've been not doing much with it since early this year.
I realized that my career plan was not going very well, so I decided to take a breather, do some reading, try to relax and assess my situation. I'm doing some AI/statistics consulting at the moment with what look to be promising VC backed startups, and I have some equity there, but I'm honestly kind of missing the passion of having my own project.
I ended up here after a book recommendation for TMF from a friend. After having now played the leadership roles of VP Engineering, CTO, CEO, as well as engineer, marketer, gopher, and pretty much whatever else was needed, I'm getting a pretty good sense of where my strengths/weaknesses lie.
If I was to visualize the ideal outcome of participating in this forum, it would be to get some mentorship on how to build a vehicle for streamlined, solid growth. I'm really good with math, technology, and computer systems, but I have only vague notions of what all the parts of a highly-functional business are. Further, I see that building things in real-world time as opposed to internet-time takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my current perspective is that I don't have as much time or freedom to make mistakes on the business development side, as opposed to building product prototypes which I'm good enough at that I can just view as purely playtime.
In the short term, I want to either revive my mothballed company, or pivot it into a money tree with some new product/service I haven't conceived of yet. Longer term I'd like to have something even more lean and hands-off -- automated trading or the like.
I think that's enough for now. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your replies! 😀
-Allen
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