Blessed Are the “Boring,” for They Create the Billion Dollar Startups

You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation - you will find meaning applying dollars and time to something you believe in.

That's still my passion. I'm passionate about computers in and of themselves, and I enjoy the mental challenges that come from tackling the tasks that I get paid to work on day-to-day. What keeps me motivated in my job now is the same thing that gets me excited about classical music: you create very special and very deep personal connections with your coworkers (or co-performers) and your clients (or audience).

This is one reason I am always much happier with in-house teams serving internal clients rather than creating products for masses of people I'll never meet. I can't imagine being happy at a company like google or facebook. But put me in a medium-sized business where I'm building tools for people I see and work with every day? I'm super happy. Thrilled that I'm touching people's lives with my work who I have a real human relationship with.

I have a problem when it comes to pursuing side projects with an aim towards maybe turning them into a business: the one thing I'm passionate about for its own sake has little available market. I probably think of 5 different things a day that would be awesome for classical musicians.

But when it comes down to it, classical musicians are generally not wealthy. They have very little disposable income, most of them are up to their eyeballs in debt because instruments are very expensive, and they are not technically savvy.

Aiming a business at that market would be stupid. They can't afford it, and they won't understand it. But it's what I care about. So what. It's a bad business choice. And I just have to accept that.

In the 11 years since I quit playing violin for a living and started my career in technology, I've come up with exactly one idea that has the broad appeal to all non-profits across the country. And I sometimes work on that. But, boy: it's boring.

The thing I'm working on right now is a totally practical itch that needs scratching, and it's for my family. My family is really big. If you count up all of the people descended just from my grandparents on my dad's side, we're talking about upwards of 1,200 human beings. Not all of whom are still alive, obviously. We've lost a couple dozen here and there. And many are quite old. My dad will be 98 in a couple of weeks. And he still jogs 5 miles a day. He's probably in better shape than my neckbeard ass is.

I hope I got his family's side of the genes. His only remaining sibling is 105, and she lives alone and takes care of herself. His mother was 102 when she passed when I was a kid. So if the 1,200 number seems crazy coming from my grandparents, I'd like you to remember that that's all the people born and married into a family where my grandma was born in 1882. That's a lot of time to generate a lot of kids. And I'm only in my late-30s. So you know, possibly a lot more to come along. :)

We have an enormous amount of family pride and stick-together-ness. We love being who we are and knowing that we're sort of everywhere. But it's really hard to keep everyone up to date.

I want us to have a totally private, secure, ad-free, social environment to share family news with each other, plan our reunions, figure out who is living where and when we might be near enough to one another to meet up. I'd like for us to be able to do this without having to mess with the constantly changing facebook privacy jiggery pokery.

We don't want to be making the sadly frequent funeral plans in a place where things could get public because someone clicks the wrong button. It needs to be dead simple to use. My dad loves facebook and is on it constantly, as are many of the older people in my family who are still with us. I want to build something for them that's a default-private place for all of us, and with end-to-end encryption.

Here's an example case where this would have been amazing. I moved to NYC almost 2 years ago. I didn't know anyone here at all except for the 5 people in the startup I was working for. NYC can be a lonely place, what with all the people around here.

Months later, I got a call from one of my cousins many states away, and she said, "I heard a rumor that you're in Brooklyn now. You, know, my son lives about a mile from you. You remember him from when you were kids? He's about your age. You should get together."

Fast forward a couple weeks and he comes over for dinner. And he has two women with him. And he says, "Oh hey. These two are also our cousins and live nearby. We got ourselves a whole fucking crew of Martins here now. Time to take over the city."

And we are a tight-nit crew today. It was a wonderful thing. I'd like to facilitate more of that for my family.

So the plan here isn't to build a business that intentionally competes with facebook or tries to take it on at scale. The idea is to build a better experience for one specific use case family social connections. Provide some tools that help event planning for things like weddings, funerals, and reunions. Some special tools for family tree exploration, wiki pages for people who have passed away, etc. It's very purpose driven towards allowing families to stay in touch.

And I figure I can't be the only person, nor we the only family, in the world who would like something like this. I think this safe, secure environment would be worth a dollar a month to enough people that I could eventually build a niche business out of it. I won't ever get hundreds of millions of users. And I don't want to. I'd be thrilled knowing that 50 thousand people in the world are using this to stay closer to the people they treasure.

And I'd happily work on that every day until I die.

Sorry, that turned into a much longer post than I intended it to. The main thing I'd say to people who want to pursue their passions as a business is to do some deep thinking about what motivates your passion. It took me a long time to understand that while, yes I am passionate about the actual music that gets written and performed in the classical genre, there's something deeper that motivates that passion. And it's something that when recognized can be applied passionately to a number of different endeavors. It can be a life-altering experience to come to the realization that what you think you are passionate about is really a surface level symptom of what's really driving you as a person.

You may find yourself doing something relatively boring in your spare time. Like, another social network. Yawn. But you might also find yourself on fire for this boring work because it is deeply and personally meaningful to you.