[geeks] Discuss this quote...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 12:13:33PM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
> Why wait?  Start small now.  You'd be surprised at how little it takes to
> get started on a trade.  The biggest two are usually time and space _not_
> money.

Starting in a trade is simple. It's going from a hobby to producing
an income that is difficult. Especially in the U.S. where you have
to do well enough when you switch to get health insurance.

The other issue is age. When you are 20, it makes a lot of sense
to quit a desk job and go do something "with your hands". As you
get older you find that it's tougher and tougher. 

I did it three times in my life. The first was around 1975 (21) when I 
(and my ex-wife) went to school to cook Chinese food professionally.
If you have never worked in a restaurant, you might think it sounds
romantic, but working 9-5 with an occasional all-nighter as a systems
programmer had a lot of attraction, not to mention, I could get 1/2
again more in computers, this was before the big inflation in salaries
in the late 1970's. 

The second was to apprentice in camera repair in 1989 (35). It ended when
I was offered $55 a hour to work as a computer consultant. But it 
was a fun time, and it gave me time off from work (I could choose my
own hours) to meet a friend for lunch and she (and her boss whom I
also knew) fixed me up with a co-worker whom I married before the
end of the year.

The third time was a combination of being ill, getting involved
with the wrong start up and deciding to go out on my own and start
a startup. We produced the only working X86 based handheld gaming
device.*

Unfortunately, I did not know how to really start a business, and vet
people such as lawyers, patent agents and "angels". In the end we
had several offers including a reverse merger which would have
made us a public company (and my stock salable for millions)
overnight (nixed by our lawyer), an offer from a large Korean
company to do a joint deal (the president of the company was insulted
by our "angel" and the deal dropped). 

A second round with them failed because no one but me wanted to sell
stock to raise $50k to show them we could do it for their cell phones.
In the end the company fizzled and our patent agent was unable to
prosecute the applications so they were denied.

In summary, if you really want to do it, you have to be prepared to
take a huge cut in income and "climb the ladder again", work your
ass off doing it, and if you want to make money at it take business
courses first. :-)

Geoff.


* Another company after us announced they had the first, but it never
  was able to play games. They showed their device at a CES by running
  movies on it of games being played and the company was defunct before
  the end of the show. There were several reasons why they crashed and 
  burned, but the most obvious was that it ran an nonexistent operating
  system. :-)

   Several months before they announced their existence, we were already 
   running DOS games, Windows games, MAME games, and Linux games.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/