Internet Entrepreneur and Weekend Hacker

Entries from September 2009

Annoying People Part I

September 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I hate to complain about Dunkin Donuts because I go there every  morning and the people that work there are nice and the breakfast is good.  My complaints are about the people who go there and you know who you are or it is possible that you are too stupid to have a computer.  Either way, you annoy me.

You wait online, get to the front of the line and when they ask what you want you have to look up at the menu.  First of all, they have the same damn food they had yesterday.  There is no miracle donut that was just created that will make you smarter and thinner.  But no, you aren’t done.  You finally get your order in with no concern for your ass and muffin top you have going on and when they give your breakfast and tell you that it is $4.98 there is a look of astonishment on your face.  Me?  Pay?  Yes, you are going to have to pay for the food.  During the 5 minute wait online and then now 45 seconds it took to get your food, you couldn’t have pried your pants away from your skin and grabbed a $5 bill.  You had to wait until you were told the price to even start to think where you had money.

You are annoying.  We have jobs to go to and you have to get to work on raising your cholesterol level a little more.  You annoy me and everyone else on line and most likely the person behind the counter too.

Categories: Annoying People · Stuff & Things
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A Life Changing Event

September 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Elmsford, NY, tucked away in Westchester County NY, is not the place you expect a Hurricane to hit, but on the evening of Sept 17th, 1999, that is exactly what happened.  We knew it was a bad storm so I sent everyone home early and at around 4PM water started to enter the front door.   I decided it was time for me to go so I jumped in my Expedition and headed home.  Later that night I drove back to the office to see what was going on but because the Saw Mill River (really just a stream on the rainiest of days) had flooded, I was able to get no closer than 9A, the E-W road near my office.  Now, I was concerned.  Hurricane Floyd had hit the town I currently live in, Delray Beach, Florida on Sept 14th and headed up the east coast to hit my then residence, Elmsford, NY.

Early morning on the 18th I pulled up to the office and saw my two story building surrounded by 3 feet of rushing water.  I knew I had to get inside so I hiked up my shorts, put my video camera under my arm (I accidentally left the camera on during this walk) and walked upstream.  Around the front and into the building and the devastation began to hit me.  A car that tried to make it through with water on its hood and branches and muck pounding the front of my building.  I pulled the door open and the water was just as high inside as out.  I took a quick step to the left and upstairs to catch my breath and access what was going on.  I was not upstairs and dry but I realized that I was in trouble, personally and financially.  Downstairs was my warehouse with hundreds of thousands of dollars in software.

Like the parting of the Red Sea, the water drained quickly and the devastation became apparent.  My warehouse was in ruins.  Piles of software had collapsed under its own weight and the mud and watery mix left a mess.  I walked around that afternoon in a daze.  We had a $30,000 product return that wasn’t picked up because we had to close early.  Destroyed.  Anything that was in the first three racks from the floor was gone.  Destroyed.

Flood insurance?  No.  First we weren’t in a flood zone.  The last time the Saw Mill River had flooded was some 40 years prior and flood insurance is a federal insurance and too expensive for a small business.  Had a water pipe broken 5 minutes before the flood waters entered my building I would have been completely covered.  But that was not the case.

The next day I had two dumpsters placed at either end of the building and we started disposal.  We threw away roughly $300,000 worth of software, a loss that a small business owner could not absorb.

What had happened took a while to sink in but that Friday I laid off 10 employees and just like  that, we were done.  A week earlier I had been interviewed by Fox News about the software business and now it was gone.

The following days  and months took it toll on me but it is now 10 years later and I am comfortable with the way I  handled the events of Sept 18th, 1999.   From Flood, to bankruptcy, to personal issues and now the sale of my recent business, a wonderful wife and a baby daughter on the way, it has been some 10 years.  It feels like yesterday I hiked up my shorted and walked up the Saw Mill River.

Categories: Business · Stuff & Things
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Couldn’t Sleep

September 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

It is 5:30 and I have been up since 2,  I gave up trying to sleep so I just went and made a cup of coffee and am sitting out on the balcony.  The intracoastal is completely still and periodically I can hear a car going over the Linton Avenue bridge.  This is the time of the day when you can hear the freight trains going by.  I do not live very close but it is so quiet that you can hear the rumble for miles.

At 2AM, MSNBC replayed their broadcast from the morning of 9/11.  Odd sitting their for two hours and watching in knowing what is coming next and what has occurred in the 8 years since.  I remember the back and forth calls to my parents that morning, I worked from home then, and the odd call from a business associate wanting to discuss an invoice with me.   It was 9:30AM on 9/11 and he wanted to ask about payment on an invoice.  I asked him if he had seen what was going on and he said yes but still wanted to know why I had under paid an invoice by $27.  I just hung up.

The NY Times had an interesting article about the aftermath of NYC and 9/11.  NYC was going to become a police state with armed military guarding the streets.  The financial world would move and no tourist would come to NYC.  None of what was predicted in those weeks after came true.

I was up in NYC in early Nov. of 2001 and lots had returned to normal.  Of course, I remember standing in the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central and there was a free standing wall that was plastered with “have you seen” pictures.  Grand Central is a loud place but if felt as through there was silence surrounding that wall.

Like everyone else, I was paralyzed that week watching the news.  I slowly got back to work as I had a small business to run and orders started to come in again by the next day but nothing social or interactive happened that week.  Finally, on Sat night I guess we had all had enough of the TV and a group of us went out to dinner.  We were at City Tavern down by the Marriott in Boca,  Every restaurant that night was packed but it was oddly quiet, not the normal raucous weekend night in Boca.

Strange the few things that I remember.  The phone call at 9:30, the wall at Grand Central and that first dinner out after 9/11.

Categories: Stuff & Things
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My Startups at 27 and 37 …

September 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I started my first business at 8 years old washing neighborhood cars for $2.00.  I didn’t quite get the  economics of it but I was making two dollars a car and what else was I going to do all summer.  The issue was that my mother was paying for all the supplies, so I understood revenue but wasn’t so strong on the actual P&L.

From there I had a lawn mowing business and then went to work  for “the man” until I started my next company at age 27.  I just inherited some money, I was 27 and had 5 years of real world experience and I knew everything there was to know about business.  How could I fail?  Almost impossible.  Almost.

The worst thing an entrepreneur can have is money that he doesn’t have to pay back and that was it.  Our version if scrounging was not getting office space for a few months.   We bought computers in the day when high end macs for design work cost us $15K and we didn’t really have any idea how to use Photoshop, but it was really a cool program.  I look back at the stupid things that we did and I think that I really deserved to lose everything I had on that business.  Of course we had a client and a big one but we let them pay us on royalties.  Wow, that was smart of us.  We were actually already out of business by the time we started receiving checks from the client.

Regardless, that business was doomed to failure and I deserved to lose my inheritance.  The worst thing that an entrepreneur can have is free money.  No one to answer to and no one to pay back.  After kicking around a little and working, consulting and starting some low tech high tech companies that made me a few bucks and after losing everything I had to Hurricane Floyd (we will discuss this at a later time)  and at the age of 37 I borrowed $10,000 from my mother because I  had an opportunity.  This was money I had to pay back.  I watched every penny of it.  I took orders, went into my garage and shipped products, answered customer service issues and did all the marketing.  My overhead was a DSL line coming into my apartment and the $50 a month I paid for the garage space.  5 years later we were an Internet Retailer Top 500 company and a year after that I  had sold PCSecurityShield to iS3.

What was the difference?  I was 10 years older and a lot more thoughtful about everything I did in business.  I hear the saying that my businesses didn’t fail but instead they were learning experiences.  They are still ego beating experiences that take its toll on an individual.  The difference with my latest startup is that I have the money available that I had at 27, but I have earned that money thought hard, hard work and am not so inclined to give it up so easily.

I will get into the hurricane, the startups and the failures in this blog, but the article in Techcrunch is right on.  I see business totally differently now than I did at 27.  I certainly reject Techcrunchs notion that at 44 … I am an “old guy” but that argument is for a different day.

Categories: Business
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400 Years of NYC

September 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When Henry Hudson pulled up to this island there were no Mets, no street fairs and I am guessing no Little Italy but the island was a vast expanse of green land with a few hundred residents and multiple ecosystems.  I always love the history of NYC, how they built different areas, Central Park was really amazing, The Empire State building and how different areas of the city evolved.  I am not much of a nature buff but the island as Henry Hudson found it 400 years ago is an interesting read.  Known as Mannahatta, check out the Mannahatta project.  I now know what lived on E 76th Street before I did.

Categories: Stuff & Things
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