26 at 26: E for Entrepreneur
None of My Business
Late last year, I turned 26. So, in the tradition of the great panel show QI, for the first half of 2014 I will be running through an alphabetical view on 26 things in my world so far.
I started my first company, Fairwood Studios, in 2009 at the age of 22. The Rock Band Network was announced that year, and I quickly realized that the sort of music I wanted to see in the game probably wasn’t what most authoring groups were going to produce. I figured, either I join up with one of the authoring groups, or form my own. And, lacking in any sort of audio engineering qualifications or any real knowledge of the Rock Band game mechanics, forming my own seemed to be the only option. Not like I was gonna get hired.
Fairwood was never exactly profitable. I gained a decent amount of acknowledgment for it — hosting a PAX East panel about RBN and repeatedly being deemed Playtester of the Month — but as a proper business venture, it hasn’t succeeded. (I’ll save the details of that for later.)
Even though I was ahead of most of my friends as far as when I started my first company, these days I’m inundated with the thought that 22 years old is too late for a first company. When you read about successful entrepreneurs, or even the autobiographies of barely-successful ones, they all talk about their first business back in high school. If not earlier. I was late to the party, with no hope of catching up.
It’s just one of the many annoying and dangerous patterns that I keep recognizing in the startup world. The tone of punditry implies that you have to emulate all great people, in all ways, to have any chance at being great yourself. Be sure to do what Bezos does, as well as what Jobs did, as well as what Gates does (or did) that doesn’t happen to be drawing ire that particular week.
This was going to be the point where this post turns into a massive sarcastic rant, raging against the follies of the narrowly-obsessed San Francisco/white male/MIT-Stanford-Harvard startup community that pushes away the different and derides rather than guides “wantrepreneurs”. And those follies are many and profound, with billions of dollars being left on the table and thousands of brilliant individuals ostracized.
But those follies are also very well-covered. Once a male of any report says anything clearly sexist about female entrepreneurs, or some Silicon Valley fanboy starts to mock some emerging Silicon Insert-Natural-Construct-Standing-In-For-Geographic-Region-Here, plenty of people rightly jump on it.
It’s one thing to be ranting about a shitty system that you’re submerged in, but ranting about it when you’re sitting on the sidelines feels almost pathetic. Right now, Fairwood is all but dead, and the “company” it evolved into — Leporidae Media — isn’t doing much either. Much as I’d love to, I don’t really have the right to lay down a sarcastic rant.
So while I was thinking this post through, I realized that this wasn’t really the important thing to be thinking about. If I’m going to call myself an entrepreneur, if I’m going to have anything resembling credibility on the important issues facing entrepreneurs — female, Portland-based, RIT-grad, or otherwise — then I should actually be building a company.
Against most intelligent advice, I sat down to actively try to think of a new project. Not for any actual reason; I still have a handful of ideas that have sat around for a while without action. I just wanted to think actively. And I did happen to stumble upon an idea when I wasn’t really looking, one good enough to make me get to work. So I’m working on it. (I’ll leave it at that for a while; give it about a month.)
This whole effort revealed something slightly interesting about myself. I’ve read inspirational content, in the Women Entrepreneurs collection and elsewhere, and pretty much universally found it uninteresting. Those daily affirmations just wash past me. But once I have an enemy, once I can target my thoughts against a foe, I’m energized. For some reason, my productivity is adversarial. It’s less about “I can do this!” and more about “fuck you, you can’t tell me I can’t do this”.
I suppose, then, this is me finally picking up a sword once again, heading to the dojo, and mixing my metaphors. The battlefield keeps calling.
And I’m going to be ranting like mad once I’m there.
And now, a moment of zen:
“The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”
