Showing Up
In February of this year, after receiving his millionth phone call from someone asking why their printer wouldn’t work, Mike parked the car and frustratingly looked over to me and said, “I think it’s time for me to quit my job and work on the energy project full time.” I hesitated for a moment and said something along the lines of, “Are you sure it will work?” Confidently he replied, “I really think it will work, but I’ll never know if I don’t try. And if I try this, it won’t work unless I focus on it full time.” While we drove, my mind starting running diligence on all of the other projects Mike had done over the years.
This energy project was a different kind of project than say, the time i came home to find our box fans in pieces on the driveway because Mike needed parts to power an aquaponic system that he had built on top of our 60 gallon fish tank while I was at work. “I wanted to teach Quinn about the nitrogen cycle and show her how to grow her own lettuce!” he exclaimed excitedly while I stood in the doorway of our room with my mouth dropped open. This time, it was a matter of him reducing our income by 75% in order to pursue something that could change our lives forever if it worked…not just tossing a few $20 box fans into the cemetery of parts where Mike’s other abandoned ideas lived. Dissolving his current self-run IT solutions business was such a huge, foreign, scary risk.
We moved to Texas from NYC during the end of the recession in 2009. Much like many other qualified people across the country, Mike struggled to find a job. After a few months of searching, he took a terrible gig doing computer repair at a tiny shop where the best part of his day consisted of using the bathroom before the guy with the violent case of IBS did. About two weeks into it and after receiving his millionth phone call from someone asking why their hard drive had failed, Mike looked at me and said, “I think it’s time for me to start my own business.Why am I working for this shitty company? I can do this myself, I know it.” Two weeks later, Mike walked out during his shift, came home to his pissed pregnant girlfriend and immediately started writing a proposal to do outsourced IT services for a state-wide company. I stood there with swolen ankles, harping on him for quitting his $8 an hour gig that could barely buy groceries. It took a few months of anxiety and stress before both he and the company agreed on the contract, but when they did, we celebrated.
A year later after Quinn was born, we were on the search for more clients. I proposed that we post an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone was interested in our services. Mike was pretty reluctant, but I posted one online anyway and he received a phone call a few hours later from someone who needed their router fixed.
This was the day our lives changed in a way we could have never imagined.
Here is what happened. Mike received a phone call from someone on Craigslist. He headed over to this person’s house and six hours later finally arrived home to a frantic spouse wondering why he hadn’t answered his phone. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE KIDNAPPED BY THE CRAIGSLIST KILLER!” I cried, tears streaming down my face. Mike, wide-eyed and bushy tailed, laughed and said “No, even crazier! You won’t believe who this guy was. He was an oil analyst, works for the Wall Street Journal doing oil and gas reporting, his dad owns one of the most successful independent oil companies in the US. He asked if I could come over again tomorrow to hang out… ” A quick friendship evolved and Mike spent the next year learning everything he could about the oil and energy industry. In the process, Mike would come home each night and teach me about the things he learned each day…mineral rights, shale plays, the chemistry behind oil refining and distillation, the list goes on. Over time, Mike became more involved in the stellar idea that he, his friend and a few other guys had come up with. He pitched their idea to make mobile oil distillation units to some of Texas’ wealthiest oilmen. He also asked the government land office if they could lease land in East Texas to set up a distilation unit as a test… and the GLO said yes. In the process, Mike met the group who runs the Texas Carbon Exchange Commission and began learning more about that industry which later allowed the two of us to run into the Australian who developed the first mobile carbon currency exchange system. Throughout that process of putting himself out there and staying open to new opportunities, Mike met his future partner, Michael.
Michael was a previous VP of Engineering and CTO for numerous large tech companies. A few months after meeting and chatting on a weekly basis, the two of them developed a brilliant idea to do distributed energy generation and embark on something that no one in the energy industry has ever done before.
And that brings us to the beginning of this post. When Mike suggested he drop his clients to work full time with Michael, I knew we had to try it.What was there to lose? By putting himself out there, asking questions, jumping on any opportunity no matter how big or small, our lives had already changed so much. I looked at him and said, “If you think this will work…let’s do it!” A smile spread across his face, he took a deep breath, we came home and emailed over his contract resignation. We disolved his LLC and a month later, we landed our first round of seed funding for his energy company and got to work.
For the last year, Mike’s routine has been the following:
Wake up. Drink coffee. Maybe take a shower, maybe not. Hour long conference call with Michael + Partners, strategize and update the whiteboard, begin coding. Code until Tara and Quinn get home from work/school, maybe eat dinner, keep coding until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore.
Some days I will come home to find Mike in the same spot that he was in when I left for work that morning. His hair will be frazzled and greasy, he has usually forgotten to eat all day,he has gone through a pack or two of cigarettes, there are scribbly pieces of paper strewn about. Usually the first thing he says is, “Hey! I want to show you want I did today!” He’ll go through lines and lines of code, showing me what they do and how the software has grown in versatility since the day before.
Mike said an interesting thing the other day. He caught me standing quietly in our pantry, racking my brain for a new way to cook Ramen or Mac n’ Cheese. I was falling into a spiral of sadness about our current financial situation. Mike said, “You know, things are so hard right now Tara, but I’m thoroughly convinced that if we continue to work really hard, if we continue to show up and give this 100% of our attention,we’ll be successful. The thing is that most people just never show up in the first place.We can’t be scared to fail… and because we’re not scared, this will work.”
While we move into the holiday season and try to get through another month of figuring out how we will pay our bills, what other amenities we can cancel to save money and how we’ll afford to give our three year old an amazing Christmas, I have never once second guessed whether Mike made the wrong choice by pursuing the start-up path.
We came across this video of Steve jobs talking about how he deals with failure. He says, “most people never ask. That’s what separates the people who do and the people who only dream about things… you’ve got to do. You’ve got to act. You’ve got to be willing to fail.” I was absolutely one of those people who came up with ideas but never acted on them because I was so scared of failing, but being the spouse of someone who’s mentality is “I’m never going to know unless I try it” is so inspiring. We’re on a tough path right now. We still have time before we can poke our head up above water and breathe, but the journey has forced us to stick together, to support each other, to be strong and appreciate the things we do have, which might be the most valuable and life-changing part of this entire journey.
Being an entrepreneur is often overrated and glamorized in the media. It is a tough, tough job. It takes a certain type of person to feel so passionate about an idea that they are willing to sacrifice almost anything and carry on with the risk of it all failing, while rarely seeing a paycheck come through during the development phase. There are very few people who can power through this phase and stay motivated, myself not included (but maybe one day.) Coming up with a great idea is one thing, but showing up and trying to prove that idea to the world no matter what happens is the hardest part of all, which is why so many start-ups fail.
In the meantime, I come home from work each day to find my spouse working diligently on proving a concept that has never been done before because he knows that if he can make it work, this bump of struggle we’re feeling will turn into a mountain of happiness and opportunity for our family. It is incredibly inspiring to watch and it makes the Ramen taste a lot better each night.
