It's two in the frickin morning. I'd say that's the time for a new
Fozzolog entry.
My current job
I've decided my current job is as president of a small, but growing Utah
company — Iodynamics. Not only does that sound better than saying
“I'm still unemployed,” but it's also more true.
Iodynamics has been gradually doing better. We're attracting more
clients and our current clients continue to give us more work. That's
why I decided it was time to see if I could make it my full-time
thing: I could either wait for 18-24 months for Iodynamics' business to
gradually build to the point where I didn't have to worry about working for
someone else, or, I could just bite the bullet and make it happen sooner.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
I've never really been a get-out-and-meet-people kind of guy but I
realize that's what you need to do if you're in the service business and
you want more clients. I'm working leads from family, friends, neighbors,
etc. Fortunately, it's reaping a lot of leads and many of those leads show
promise. I hope that promise is realized. We'll see.
My friend Chadd made an interesting observation tonight. He mentioned
that Iodynamics went through the “dot-com boom” and we were
doing some really amazing stuff that nobody else was doing and we were
making peanuts doing it. Things are different now. The “dot-com
bubble has burst”; Lots of people know how to pronounce &ldqou;Linux”; Iodynamics is doing pretty
good.
There are a few reasons for this seemingly ironic set of circumstances,
I think. First, the “dot-com bubble” was ripe with people who
had no real talent or fortitude. As soon as this so called bubble burst,
they went away or back to whatever it was they were doing before they
decided they were going to be an Internet junkie.
Look at the Internet companies that have survived! They had real
products or services and sensible business plans.
My point here is that we know what we're doing.
That may seem like a pompous thing to say, but I think the proof lies in
the fact a lot of the software Iodynamics has deployed still works and
works well. Sure, I've looked back at code I wrote years ago and said,
“Man, I could write that code so much better now.” but not,
“What was I thinking?! This makes no sense!”
Secondly, we in Iodynamics are (slowly) learning how to run a company.
It's a lot harder than it looks. Growing a company is even more difficult.
I'm sure it's easier if you have venture capital funding to play with, but
that's why most of the Internet startups aren't with us anymore. :-)
The wife
The only problem is Christine. She's not as sold on this self-employment
thing as I am. For the moment, she seems willing to tolerate my exuberance
without rolling her eyes too much. I know she'd like me to find a nice
(seemingly) stable job writing code or babysitting machines for a large
corporation and I can't argue there are definite advantages to doing that.
If I did get such a job, I could probably start getting paychecks that are
significantly larger than what Iodynamics is paying me now.
It seems to me, however, tech companies are only interested in tech
workers on a per-project basis. “Stable” jobs are rare.
On top of that, I'm going with the hope and the promise that, at some
point, I may be drawing pay from Iodynamics that rivals what any large
corporation would want to pay me.
I love this girl and I hate that I'm putting her through stress right
now with this somewhat risky adventure, but it's my hope my fear of
disappointing her will keep it from ever happening.
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