HTM|JaK_5quat
10-04-2005, 02:33 PM
I just have to post something about my personal situation that has been heavy on my mind though I haven't mentioned it over the past year and a half.
As some of you may remember, I'm a freelance techy/graphic artist. I spent 20+ years playing saxophone for a leaving, but was a physics major with an art minor in college and drifted into design and web development to get off the road about 12 years ago. My freelance design biz grew from 1993 to 2001 until I met another entrepreneur that had a good advertising and web-sales idea and we partnered up. I won't get into what exactly that biz entailed but I'll briefly say it involved yellow page advertising on the web (http://www.iypw.com) and moving revenued traffic to affiliate sites. No porn. It was a good idea and actually involved several business models stacked on top of each other. Anyway, after several years of development it started to generate nice amounts of money (especially nice since the revenue was click-thru based and came in whether I was minding it or fishing on my boat!). So it clicked along (literally) for about a year and a half, until my partner transformed himself into a shark and stabbed me in the back thru a couple of loopholes I had neglected to close in our corporate structure. Shame on me I guess - my wife says I'm too trusting - but I'll be damned if I'm going to change that part of me. I'm 51 and my blood pressure is still 110 over 60 so I must be doing something right! hehheh
Anyway, I ended up losing executive control and my share was reduced to 30% from 50% and since I had been CTO, the sites suffered from traffic loss (down to less than 10,000 visitors a month from over a million) and I just couldn't see myself working to bring it back to enrich my slimy partner. And HIS technological expertise precluded HIS bringing anything back - he had the idea but can hardly download his fricking email let alone run a set of 6 redundantly load-balanced state-of-the-art Linux servers and react intellegently to changes in Google's rankings etc. So the business lanquished and I had 30% of nothing. He made the mistake of making his greed-play just as Google launched it's "LocalSearch" and changed their algorythms - which had happened several times before though I was on-the-job and made the fixes.
I had let most of my web clients go since we were generating a 1/4 mill plus a year. so I found myself in a nasty financial situation. Fortunately I had squirreled away enough dough to cool my heels for a year and attempt to regroup - read that as "sit on my sorry ass and wonder how I might miraculously reinvent myself." Well, it became a kind of self-destructive nightmare in my own head. Living in the boonies and working alone can be a self-insulating and depressing situation. Recently I was starting to feel desperation. I was down to the last of my money - it had been 1-1/2 years since any real income over a thousand here and there and I was thinking I might actually have to go find some shitty job somewhere. For someone 51 and never really "worked" for anyone, it was quite sobering - which I sedated as much as possible with "unsobering." I had actually paid my monthly bills with credit cards last month, so it was getting quite desperate.
So a couple weeks ago an old friend is stuck in traffic down in Seattle and he said, "Something told me to call Jeff." We used to play in the jazz band together back in Hi Skool and we had reconnected in 2002 at our 30 year reunion. He had built a hi-tech company (which he sold in 2003 for 4 mill). So he calls and asks how my venture is going and I give him the shark tale and ask what he's doing now - we hadn't spoken since our slew of 50th birthday parties in 2004.
Well, he tells me he started up another company in January that's based on small business servers and networking etc. and that he's put together his old team from his first venture and is fleshing out the biz as a partnership of key people - So I say I'm interested and we set up a meeting at his offices last week. So to make a longer story only semi-long, I decide to keep it loose and I drive down to Seattle wearing my usual shorts, tennis shoes, t-shirt and fishing vest (because I'm going fishing after the meeting with another bud in town - I always try to complete multiple tasks with any trip). It turns out to be the right move because everyone is dressed casually and the energy is incredible. I give him and the other partners my ideas for the web presence and how it can automate sales and support and even assist in customization of the product for the client etc. Then I went fishing...
That night, last Wednesday, I get an email from him saying how good it was to see me and how he liked my energy and that we should talk somemore and I should go ahead and start working on the website. So I think, cool, at least it'll be another web client toward building my biz back up. So I quickly grab the logo of their current (rather lame) website and throw out a little design on Friday morning for them to look at.
Now the really good part. So he calls me about 8 in the evening on Friday night and we have a very energetic conversation for about 2 hours that ends with, "I've discussed it with the partners and we think you would be a great addition to the team. You could do most of your work remotely since you're all set-up to work that way, and only have to come into the office for key meetings and such. So I'm offering you a full partnership and $75,000 per year in salary."
Well, I don't think my heart has pounded that hard in a long time baby! (well, except maybe when I kill The Dog! hehheh) So, I'm going to probably get a little busier now and then and you might not see me everyday but JaK is Back with a JaK JaK AttaK, and I had to let my buds know. It's been a tough year, not that I talked about it, but now you know the whole sordid story. Hell, my kids might even get to go to college, and I might get that little bit bigger boat I've always wanted.
Cheers,
JaK
As some of you may remember, I'm a freelance techy/graphic artist. I spent 20+ years playing saxophone for a leaving, but was a physics major with an art minor in college and drifted into design and web development to get off the road about 12 years ago. My freelance design biz grew from 1993 to 2001 until I met another entrepreneur that had a good advertising and web-sales idea and we partnered up. I won't get into what exactly that biz entailed but I'll briefly say it involved yellow page advertising on the web (http://www.iypw.com) and moving revenued traffic to affiliate sites. No porn. It was a good idea and actually involved several business models stacked on top of each other. Anyway, after several years of development it started to generate nice amounts of money (especially nice since the revenue was click-thru based and came in whether I was minding it or fishing on my boat!). So it clicked along (literally) for about a year and a half, until my partner transformed himself into a shark and stabbed me in the back thru a couple of loopholes I had neglected to close in our corporate structure. Shame on me I guess - my wife says I'm too trusting - but I'll be damned if I'm going to change that part of me. I'm 51 and my blood pressure is still 110 over 60 so I must be doing something right! hehheh
Anyway, I ended up losing executive control and my share was reduced to 30% from 50% and since I had been CTO, the sites suffered from traffic loss (down to less than 10,000 visitors a month from over a million) and I just couldn't see myself working to bring it back to enrich my slimy partner. And HIS technological expertise precluded HIS bringing anything back - he had the idea but can hardly download his fricking email let alone run a set of 6 redundantly load-balanced state-of-the-art Linux servers and react intellegently to changes in Google's rankings etc. So the business lanquished and I had 30% of nothing. He made the mistake of making his greed-play just as Google launched it's "LocalSearch" and changed their algorythms - which had happened several times before though I was on-the-job and made the fixes.
I had let most of my web clients go since we were generating a 1/4 mill plus a year. so I found myself in a nasty financial situation. Fortunately I had squirreled away enough dough to cool my heels for a year and attempt to regroup - read that as "sit on my sorry ass and wonder how I might miraculously reinvent myself." Well, it became a kind of self-destructive nightmare in my own head. Living in the boonies and working alone can be a self-insulating and depressing situation. Recently I was starting to feel desperation. I was down to the last of my money - it had been 1-1/2 years since any real income over a thousand here and there and I was thinking I might actually have to go find some shitty job somewhere. For someone 51 and never really "worked" for anyone, it was quite sobering - which I sedated as much as possible with "unsobering." I had actually paid my monthly bills with credit cards last month, so it was getting quite desperate.
So a couple weeks ago an old friend is stuck in traffic down in Seattle and he said, "Something told me to call Jeff." We used to play in the jazz band together back in Hi Skool and we had reconnected in 2002 at our 30 year reunion. He had built a hi-tech company (which he sold in 2003 for 4 mill). So he calls and asks how my venture is going and I give him the shark tale and ask what he's doing now - we hadn't spoken since our slew of 50th birthday parties in 2004.
Well, he tells me he started up another company in January that's based on small business servers and networking etc. and that he's put together his old team from his first venture and is fleshing out the biz as a partnership of key people - So I say I'm interested and we set up a meeting at his offices last week. So to make a longer story only semi-long, I decide to keep it loose and I drive down to Seattle wearing my usual shorts, tennis shoes, t-shirt and fishing vest (because I'm going fishing after the meeting with another bud in town - I always try to complete multiple tasks with any trip). It turns out to be the right move because everyone is dressed casually and the energy is incredible. I give him and the other partners my ideas for the web presence and how it can automate sales and support and even assist in customization of the product for the client etc. Then I went fishing...
That night, last Wednesday, I get an email from him saying how good it was to see me and how he liked my energy and that we should talk somemore and I should go ahead and start working on the website. So I think, cool, at least it'll be another web client toward building my biz back up. So I quickly grab the logo of their current (rather lame) website and throw out a little design on Friday morning for them to look at.
Now the really good part. So he calls me about 8 in the evening on Friday night and we have a very energetic conversation for about 2 hours that ends with, "I've discussed it with the partners and we think you would be a great addition to the team. You could do most of your work remotely since you're all set-up to work that way, and only have to come into the office for key meetings and such. So I'm offering you a full partnership and $75,000 per year in salary."
Well, I don't think my heart has pounded that hard in a long time baby! (well, except maybe when I kill The Dog! hehheh) So, I'm going to probably get a little busier now and then and you might not see me everyday but JaK is Back with a JaK JaK AttaK, and I had to let my buds know. It's been a tough year, not that I talked about it, but now you know the whole sordid story. Hell, my kids might even get to go to college, and I might get that little bit bigger boat I've always wanted.
Cheers,
JaK