How I spent my winter vacation, part 1. · Mon Mar 30, 05:30 PM

It’s a long story, perhaps even longer than the time it took to live it. I’ll try to shorten the telling judiciously.

I left my previous position, working as a lead developer for a local ISV, late last year, and started searching for a startup-type development position — my preferred environment, due to the energy, the variety of things that need to be done, and the opportunity to address real problems in the marketplace (the potential equity-based upside also helps maintain interest and motivation during the grungy bits). The stock market crash and ensuing brouhaha put a real damper on that market, unfortunately. After a brief pause to bemoan fate, I decided to take some time between jobs to start my own company, as folks often do, or so I think I read somewhere.

You might expect me to have launched an enterprise focusing on something I’m extremely good at, where I’m knowledgeable of the market, the challenges, and the customers — say, the software industry. Granted, of the dozens or hundreds of ideas I’ve accumulated for potential software-related ventures, there are at least a few that I’m fairly certain would make decent amounts of money.

But that’s not what I did, for several reasons. First of all, where’s the fun in that? Second, without external funding, I’d almost certainly not reach the point of being self-sustaining before needing to get paid. (The obvious solution — get external funding — is problematic due to the economy, and fairly boring-sounding to boot, and avoiding boredom ranks very high on the scale of my motivations.) I’d then be faced with the two unpleasant alternatives of either having to shelve my new venture soon after starting it, or trying to do software all day at work, and then going home and working on different software all night at home. Either of those is scads of fun for me…but not both at the same time.

Instead, I’ve started a company that is largely a vehicle for selling my artwork. The more-or-less traditional route for fine artists is to make art, and sell it in partnership with an agent and/or dealer(s), which doesn’t provide much in the way of business experience. (From what I understand, that’s a large part of what’s so appealing about that route for most artists, because they don’t want to deal with business issues. This may, in turn, be a factor in the perhaps even-more-traditional route for fine artists, which is to languish and starve unappreciated and unknown.)

As it turns out, starting a company, even a sole proprietorship on a small budget, is an enormous amount of work. This probably surprises few people, and in fact I knew that there would be some amount of grinding labor involved. What was surprising to me was just how much that “some amount” would turn out to be. The other thing that was unexpected is how many misleading affordances there are in the available information and resources for small business owners. By this I mean not that there is some lack of knowledge or even willing advisers — quite the contrary — but that there is so much information available that it makes for a terrible chore to ferret out which bits one needs, which bits are helpful but not required, and which are entirely wrong alleys. The information explosion is not at all a phenomenon solely of the information worker.

The good news, of course, is that any problem you face as a business owner or entrepreneur has been seen before, and almost certainly solved — and if not solved, at the very least ruminated upon, discussed, and debated, enough so you have some guideposts by which to navigate.

The bad news is that this plethora of data only shifts work to different points in the pipeline — figuring out whether you have a problem; if you do have a problem, then figuring out what the problem is; and finally, finding the repository of information that is intended to address that problem, and making appropriate use of it.

Underlying all of this is a murmuring current of uncertainty as to whether the time you spend researching and addressing the situation will turn out to be a net waste, and you should’ve just spent your effort working on some other bits entirely. Heaven knows there are enough bits amongst which you can scatter yourself.

In any case, my business — Ars Arboris — is now a going concern, complete with books, expenses, revenue, a legal name, tax ID numbers, a website (of sorts), and even an employee (very part-time, to be sure, but even that turned out to be a Medusa’s-head of regulations and requirements). This will give me something to do on weekends. So I’ve got that going for me.

Now that that’s in place, and now that I’m out of buffer cash and nowhere near profitability yet, I’m hitting the résumé circuit hard starting this week. If you, or someone you know, needs some flash-and-panache in the form of a hard-hitting heavyweight Windows developer and architect with scads of experience and the scars to prove it, a love of unit tests and agile development, and a fire in the belly to do some great things, drop me a line, would you? (Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail.)

In the meantime, enjoy the visit of the First Nobleman.

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-- David --

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A rumble is felt in the ground     Something hot off the grill...later today.