Taking the plunge … step by step down the ladder

I’ve been talking these last few days with an old friend of mine in Chicago. We hadn’t been in touch in many years and have spent a number of calls and e-mails filling each other in on the details of our lives and work.

Oddly enough, it turns out that we’ve taken similar paths. Like me, my friend started out as an English major and went into journalism. But then – much earlier than I did – he crossed over into business, got an MBA and held a number of high-level jobs with large Chicago corporations. He’s currently a partner in a communications firm.

But what interested me the most about his varied career were the two start-ups he tried to launch and how they fell victim to events that were not of my friend’s making or within his control. The first company died a-borning because a partner backed out and as a result, so did the funder; the second because the NASDAQ crash badly dented an angel investor’s holdings and so, once again, the funding went away.

My friend is nothing if not brave, creative and innovative – he’s working on a third idea. And the way he’s planning to carry it out has reassured me about how I’m proceeding with Geniocity.

He’s taking it slowly, not counting on the infant venture to support him, and he’s building it with his own money, a bit at a time. He plans to use sweat equity, not someone else’s big check, as the foundation of the business. He wants this one to work so, as he put it, “I am simply going to build the site that I know I’d be interested in, and therefore, I hope, a site that I think other people would be interested in.”  

Those words made me feel as if I were looking in a mirror, because that’s exactly the plan I’ve had to adopt for Geniocity. Like my friend, I’ve had my hopes of major funding disappointed and had to correct both my approach and my expectations. Though I continue to pursue my original idea, I’ve had to resign myself to a much longer and more arduous development phase of doing everything myself and making progress by little steps. Yet that process is teaching me many things I need to know – and though they agonize me now, I’ll be glad I learned them thoroughly when my company starts to grow in earnest.

It wasn’t wisdom that changed my view, just practicality: I recognized that this micron-by-micron strategy was the only way I could keep my idea and my enterprise alive. And now, because my much more knowledgeable friend has chosen the same kind of plan, I feel increasingly confident that I’m going at this the way I should.