kochbeck

This is sort of a funny question because it's one where answers arising from the brashness of youth just sound brash. The strains of, "The power is all in your hands," just don't ring as true when you actually have to sing them to someone who's trying to make life decisions. I had a recent failure, and I've crafted an exit strategy for just such occasions. Here's my pitch:

I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life. Aside from a brief stint at IBM where mostly people looked at me funny for two years, I've done ridiculously financially risky things just because I enjoy taking risks and seeing if I can make them come out. I'm like a compulsive gambler who bets the rent every month, except I place longer-term bets than the craps table, and I've beat the house more than half the time.

I published my first piece of code at 7, and it was for a TRS-80. Like most risk addicts, the #1 predictor of getting hooked is early success. Even if you're predisposed to being an adrenaline junkie, if you hurt yourself trying the first few times, you're done. Needless to say, the heroin of early success has a particularly acute effect on a 7 year old.

I tried a lot of stuff over time, some of it way out of my league, some not worth trying, some just dumb, and some a bad fit for the exigent circumstances of life and market. Those were the losers, and I've been kicked in the balls hard many times by betting on losing ideas, bad plans, lousy partners, conniving vendors, bad customers, and, more than anything, my own personal triumph of hope over cold, hard experience.

I also have just enough successes to keep me hooked. But on average, I'm not a whole lot better off financially than many of my 9-to-5er friends. My years where I turned over a lot of personal income are offset by the years when I don't, for sure. So for me, it just isn't about wealth. It's about the one place where I have the 9-to-5ers beat: that where they say, "Wouldn't it be cool if somebody..." I live my life being able to say, "Isn't it cool that I did?" But that's not the life for everybody. Most folks need the sense of security and uniform societal justification that being one more cog in the machine brings. I've never personally valued or had either.

So I totally blew a startup project I was working on for over a year. All but abandoned it a couple months ago. It was just too complex to fund, and it was a regulatory nightmare. I personally lost most of my net worth on the miscalculation. Oops. (On the bright side, I didn't lose anybody else's money, so I came out with as many friends as I went in with.)

And, of course, it flamed out at the height of the biggest recession in generations, so I was left fairly idle. I moped. I piddled. I taught myself to cook. I toyed with other backburner ideas I've let simmer for a long time. I did a fair bit of nothing and pretended it wasn't awful and painful and embarrassing and deflating and demoralizing. I'd trot out Michael Jordan's, "I've missed more than 9000 shots..." quote in my head and try to ignore that he was Michael Jordan and I wasn't.

The other day, I was talking with a recruiter friend of mine, and he said that it would be easy to get me a real job (gasp, choke). Suggested that I join his big company, do something simple, and let them pay for grad school in some subject area that I enjoy but doesn't necessarily have any commercial value. Get paid to hang with folks and just think for a few years. So I considered it. I even began the application process.

Then, I talked to a line manager at the company my recruiter friend works for (because I do my homework), and the guy related to me how much trouble they have managing the line because they have very weak procedures and no training on the line as to how they'd develop procedures.

My response was: "Well heck, I've been wanting to do some Android development, and you guys all have Android phones. I'll just build you an app to support your line management. I'll learn Android on a non-trivial project, and you'll get to know me."

The point (and I do have one) is that even my personal risk management behaviors are colored by entrepreneurial behaviors. I'm thinking of taking a 35-hour per week job to pay me to go hang out at a school and pay the rent, and I somehow manage to turn my job interview into new development and a mini-enterprise applications project. It's just who I am now.

I have a lot of respect for people who walk away from the startup game and go act like normies - I know tons of 'em, and I know that almost all of them miss the exhilaration and the sense that every time they come to work, they have a chance to move the needle. I can't seem to let myself give up that rush, and I really don't want to. I have no problem picking up high-paying work when I need it, but that's a function of having cultivated skills that have value no matter what kind of job I take - startup or secure (consulting, of course). I'm confident that if push came to shove and I needed to walk away, I could. I have a steady stream of job offers to prove it.

Churchill said that success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Of course, he won his war, so he would say that. And forums like HN are rich in first-attempt winners because there's an audience for them. So they've been as immunized to failure as a published 7-year-old. If you get into startups and totally flame out, assuming you can tolerate failure like a fully-formed adult (seriously, be sure you can), you might end up taking a pay cut if you decide to leave for higher ground. You might end up leaving for something deadly boring. But any losses you incur will probably be temporary, relatively minor, and non-fatal.

Or maybe you'll get hooked, and your life will just stay interesting. If you live by the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," then don't do it. If you think that's a blessing and not a curse, go for it.

The answer to this question tends to greatly depend on whether you overeat / eat in an otherwise unhealthy way such that it's causing you harm or if you merely don't like the idea of eating junk, so you want to cut back.

For instance, I'm just finishing a medically supervised protein-sparing modified fast where I lost 70 pounds in 5 months by eating only prescription liquid foods and only about 800 calories a day. This has the effect of "rebooting" your cravings. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to some fresh vegetables and fruit right now, and I used to be a big junk food craver. Having said that, you'd think 5 months of not eating anything except protein pudding would be difficult, but it was incredibly easy, and I enjoyed it a lot. And it mostly unscrambled the signals to my brain that said, "Eat all the cookies you can find," that ran 24 hours a day.

If that sounds like you, and your weight or other stats like triglycerides / cholesterol / liver enzymes / blood sugar are unhealthy, you should see a doctor and ask about medical weight management right away. I can tell you from experience that it's a lot easier to lose 20 pounds than it is to lose 70, so you can't win by waiting. Also, a great book on the subject is David Kessler's "The End of Overeating." He goes into great detail on the psychological and chemical triggers that induce hypereating.

Now, on the other hand, if you're just prone to snacking on junk in fairly moderate ways, you ought to exercise a little environmental control:

- Shop at farmer's markets for veggies and corner grocers for milk and staples.

- Don't go to the supermarket. If you do go to the supermarket, only shop the aisles with wholesome foods, and never buy anything on the eye-level shelves (the worst, most processed stuff).

- Don't bring junk home. If you buy something junky, buy only one serving. If it only comes in multi-serving packs, take one serving out, then freeze the rest. Make it harder to dig into.

It's also useful to keep records of your eating. If you have an iPhone, I had a lot of success with the app LoseIt. Studies show that people keep off 50% more weight when they keep records than when they don't. If you're mindful of what you're eating and how you're eating it, you create brief openings in which you actually have a choice to eat or not rather than to just eat mindlessly. It also helps to know what macronutrients (fat, sugar, protein, fiber, salt) you're consuming and in what balance. If it's out of balance, shop in a way that balances it out.

Consider foods that induce satiety. Protein has the highest satiety value - if you have to snack, try a protein pudding or shake first, let it settle in your stomach, and see if you're still hungry. Add water on top of that, because thirst often feels like hunger.

Finally, if you seem to be resolving your hunger, but you still feel an overwhelming urge to eat in spite of not being physically hungry, see a doctor or psychiatrist who specializes in eating behaviors. Most people who compulsively eat have no idea they're doing it because A) it snuck up on them over a number of years and B) everyone around them does it too (consider how many startups we've seen full of thin young folks who turned into chunky folks while they worked together).

Good luck!

The really unfortunate things about your situation are:

1. You're probably legally misclassified as a contractor rather than a full-time employee. You should read IRS Rule 87-41 to understand why that is, but the really telling part is that you're carefully managed as to work down to the minute. Dead giveaway - you're an employee.

2. Since you're clearly an employee, you're subject to the protections of FMLA. My favorite nickname for FMLA is the "F*ing Leave Me Alone" Act. If you're hospitalized and your employer knows it, it's really unnecessary to invoke FMLA to receive its protections. Your employer violated it by requiring you to work while incapacitated.

3. Because you're misclassified, you're probably paying self-employment tax, so you're getting screwed coming and going.

4. Your employer is too lazy to figure out how to get benefits for small firms. Going to a trade association like the AeA would easily get you access to insurance at a good rate. I assume he's covered through his spouse, and, as such, doesn't need coverage. So he's letting you hang.

IANAL, but I've been an exec who has had to walk in and clean up quite a few shops doing illegal things like this. Here are some options.

A) Just leave. Easier said than done, obviously. Also, he almost certainly owes you back overtime as well as back taxes that he didn't deposit consistent with the IRC.

B) Contact your state's version of the Labor Board. Explain the situation, and see if they're able to take administrative action on your behalf. This might be a good option for you, because these actions are usually sealed, and they'll order the employer to provide null references in the future.

C) Get a lawyer and sue. This can get very messy very quickly, and the real downside of it is that since your pay rate is only about $12.50/hr, even if a court awarded you a year's salary, an attorney on contingency would take half of it, and you'd still be boned. Also, future employers have a way of finding out about employee lawsuits, and it makes you somewhat more unemployable since there's nothing that says they can't discriminate against you based on your past history of litigating against employers.

Now, an interesting side option is that I suspect that you don't have an ironclad Intellectual Property and Inventions Assignment agreement with the company, given that he's a management slob. Odds are that it's buried in your contractor agreement which is, itself, a piece of fiction. There might be a severability clause in it, but I bet a judge would vacate the entire agreement if given the chance. That means that you possibly OWN the intellectual property of the company. Which is to say, in effect, that you own the core asset of the company since the IP and the client list are probably its only assets.

I can't speak for you to say whether you WANT to own this company's core asset, and certainly if you owned the IP and licensed it back to the founder, you'd have the joy of having to continue working with him for as long as that went on. But since the company is successfully signing customers and is turning over about $400k a year, that may well be a lucrative path to pursue.

Anyhow, the way you'd look into that is to contact the local branch of the nearest major municipality's bar association. Almost all of them have a referral service, and it's usually cheap or free. An attorney will probably give you an hour or so to go over the case and figure out if it's a good idea to act or just jump ship.

I wish you luck, and I hope your next employer appreciates you more than your current one does.

Interesting idea. Not a bad one, necessarily, but you'd need to wrap some more requirements about what you want to get and your personal parameters. I could actually use someone with your skills, but I want to be clear what you want to get. Hit me at my email in my profile if you want to chat!

Hate to be another naysayer, but...

You're probably also incurring a lot of liability just by contracting the individual shipper to take an action on your behalf. Say your person is dropping a package that's just off their route to wherever they're going. They pull off the freeway, and BAM get hit by a semi. Congratulations, you're going to be the recipient of a huge lawsuit.

Easy to dismiss that as, "Well how often does that happen?" Accidents happen, on average, one per every thousand driven hours. So if you've got a thousand en route today that are taking more than an hour, you get to have this problem once a day, on average (v weak extrapolation, I know).

Some things can't be done as a lean startup. Some things cost major money before their first day (e.g. airlines, long-haul data services, auto manufacturing). You managed to pick a non-lean industry.

I've been curious what the real benefit is of an operation that needs an onsite (versus multisite) phone system for fewer than, eh... the size of a single 16-24 station line card to use VoIP in the first place? If you've got under 10 people, you might be able to get away with a used 3x8 Norstar which has the approximate maintenance overhead of a desk lamp. And in some areas, you could probably be even better off than getting a key system with good old Centrex.

Again, this is largely curiosity. But when you start getting into maintenance and UI and latency and encoding support and QoS from your ISP and whatever else you have to care about to make simple dialtone work, I wonder if maybe the problem is getting nerded to death for no good reason?

Search your area for a press company that does gang run printing. Might not be a good choice depending on your media size and layout, but it's often the cheapest thing going. In SF, I know a number of folks who use these guys: http://www.clubcardprinting.com/

I too was a TAMSter in Texas. This sounds somewhat different, though, and probably in a good way.

The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science is a program to allow students from the top 1-2% of high schoolers in Texas register in an honors-level degree program at the University of North Texas. All TAMSters live onsite at UNT in a single dormitory as regular university students.

This other program, in contrast, seems to be directing students to local community colleges. They would stay at home, take their general studies courses, and then transfer to 4 year universities when they had completed their two years.

The biggest difference is actually the living situation - home versus dorm. Not surprisingly, putting a few hundred post-adolescents into a dorm together for the first time who have been convinced by their environment their whole life that they are special and advanced tends to create a situation in which you have a bunch of kids with raging hormones who would like to try drunken sex from chandeliers and have hundreds of agreeing voices that their exceptional specialness exempts them from any rational adult thinking or supervision.

Needless to say, staying at home has the immediate benefit of dad coming after you with the belt if you try such things.

I have the benefit of two decades (yikes!) of hindsight in considering my early entrance experience. Would I do it again? Hell yes. Would I send my kids through it? Um, maybe. About 2/3 of my friends in the Academy were married by the time they were 21. Most now have kids that are approaching high school age. Being in our mid-30s, that makes us accelerated in more ways than one, some of which were not as desirable as others.

Although at 15 I would not have appreciated an early admissions program where I stayed at home, I think that a couple more years of rigorous parenting might not necessarily be a bad thing today.

tl;dr: Early admission programs differ in many ways, and due to those differences, YMMV.

He's 11? By the time I was 11 I was pretty darn good in Z-80 Macro Assembler. If he wants to make games, it's much better to get comfortable learning the hard stuff first. At his age, learning to kick a sprite across the screen will seem pretty... childish.

I've been reading the new edition of Jeff Duntemann's "Assembly Language Step by Step." While I don't particularly like how he teaches hex (which is terribly necessary to understanding Assembly), the rest of it made me think that it was the book I wish I had when I was a kid.