so, here is my mini-post of why I am an entrepreneur.

I had a number of things that led to the decision, but after my first startup failed, there was little doubt in my mind that THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE I WANTED TO DO MORE. In high school I had a few experiences, were going against the flow not only provided me with experiences that I could not learn in textbooks, but I also found financial benefit from them too.

One such experience, was when I was working at Omni Grocery Store, and I had a string of quick promotions from doing something of core value to me, but it was out side of the scope of my job. I started as a stock boy to learn the store, but when they found I was helping the customers, they thought that I was both too slow at stocking selves, and too helpful to let go, so they promoted me to check-out. Next, at check-out I caused disruption by being friendly. I would ID and card all women buying alcohol, and I would try to remember all of the customers names. With time I started greeting them by name. Again, I had lines when other checkers were waiting for customers, and my scan rate was much slower than theirs, so again they wanted to promote me to customer service, rather than let me go, they offered me another pay raise. With 1 week of customer service training and no work, the Union was getting insistent of me joining. Having a core disbelief in the function of Unions I avoided the issue again, only to find that the store wanted to promote me to manager as that would be the only way to keep me and not join the Union. It was an odd circumstance, but it gave me a tremendous confidence in being different and going my own way. I started the summer earning $4.25 an hour, and by the end of the summer I had been promoted to $6.xx an hour, and management would have brought me closer to $7. I had my goals in school and on the football team, and with manager they wanted me to work 18 hours a week, and from my estimates I could only afford 12 hours of work and still meet my goals. So, I asked for reduced hours, and they were insistent, so I quit. A week later I was shopping in the store, and the store offered me a scholarship if I would come back and work for the store. They just wanted 2 years of me after college. I declined, I had earned plenty that summer for the fall, winter and spring.

Next summer, it was time to get another Job, but this time I had won a few competitions from my independent studies in engineering graphics (drafting), and in the summer is I started interviewing for drafting jobs that were offering $35k a year. After a little help, and a few interviews I landed a job at $9 an hour as an engineering intern. I was proficient enough at my job that I often had dead time, but because I was working at a startup consulting company in house, they gave me random projects, like programing and technical recruiting work. The programing was fun, and I latter realized that I was being billed at $50 an hour and being payed $9 an hour for my time. At the end of the summer I was awarded a $3,500 bonus, which felt good. I also loved being able to work 10 hours a day with over time being billed at 1 1/2. In my time there, I did several large drafting projects, called about 500 people, placed 5 at $.5 million in business for our consultancy, and I programmed 2 databases. It was a ton of fun, and I earned a ton of cash that summer for college.

The following summer I asked for a raise, enough for me to live on my own, I was shot down, so I stayed up at college that summer.

The next summer I had a huge corporate job, at a fortune 500. The company had no problem paying me to sit around all day, but then at 4pm on friday, also had no problem asking me to work over time till 10pm, when the Alaska consultants would !be done with the next release of the code. My Bill Lumburg boss was always very upset with me when I did not want to cancel a date on friday night. He also hated it when I would work on projects to help the efficiency of the company in dead time, and when I would read the engineering spec to things like USB 2.0 for fun(again during dead time). So after you combine the 45Hz lighting with the 56Hz CRT monitor, the boring, hurry up and wait work, with the poorly managed employees, I developed a sort of habbit to come home at 4pm, sleep till 9pm, and then go to the bars from 9pm till 2am only to do it all over again the next day. I was so depressed, to think this is what I have to look forward to to graduating.

Upon graduating, I had a consulting job working on a custom software project, and at first it was great earning more than my just graduated peers, heck I had plenty of experience under my belt, but then again I had experience under my belt and I KNEW that the project was being miss managed and that it would not get done. I kept trying to get the team to do things in off hours to get it going in the right way, but the team lead was not happy with me. It ended up as a confrontation in the server room, where he tried to play me in to complacency, and said "its either my way or the highway." His plan had convinced the other folk to stick around and continue to pay their mortgages, and car payments; but felt it was more important to tell him to change his ways. I ended up quiting that day, and ended up putting more time into one of my side projects that turned into a very educational but very expensive lesson for me. Not only did I spend most of my cash, but I lost friends in the process to not knowing how to manage a full business vs. just a software project.

After that first business failed, I knew that I would rather fail 10 more times if it meant 1 success, than to work at another corporate job where I had to have another stupid boss. Now working for that startup consulting business in high school, was the second best job in my life. Second to my current startup, where I think I have been doing a much better job than my first startup, but I now know that I need to react faster to lessons being learned. So for me, I think it's an innate feeling of wanting the freedom to try things, life learning, stay active, and leading people to a better solution. To me making something beautiful is of so much more value to me, than making person gain for it.