Today’s topic is an extension of a show I did a few weeks ago about my innovation self-confidence. Entrepreneurship is a huge part of innovation at any level. On today’s show, we will discuss entrepreneurship and the learning experiences and steps that made me a successful innovator throughout my career. 

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship consists of having an idea, being assertive, having a strategy, etc. I quickly realized from my Deltek experiences that I was not ready to jump right into entrepreneurship. After working at Deltek, I went to a company called Individual Software where I was hired again by my previous boss from Deltek, Bob Davis. The company was small and had only been around for a few years, and my experiences there taught me how to work inside of a startup. At Individual Software, I worked on designing and building products through coding. At this job, everybody was a salesman, everybody was the shipping department, everyone was customer service, etc. As an entrepreneur, you have to do literally everything, and there is not time to just sit back and work on ideas. Individual Software did a great job of teaching me some basic skills of entrepreneurship and how it really plays out.

Early Lessons Learned

Before getting the first big IPO win that I could build my career off of, I was involved in a ton of startups. I realized early on that I was going to have to go to multiple different jobs to learn different parts of entrepreneurship. At Individual Software, my boss Joel was a former executive at a big company in Silicon Valley. He believed that the training technology around the PC was going to be the next big thing. I went there to be part of a team in a small organization and I realized yet again that you have to do everything as an entrepreneur. The next position I took was with an organization called Corporate Resource Associates. CRA was started by two people I worked with at Deltek, Bob Davis, my mentor, and Roxie Westfall. Here I wasn’t involved in getting the startup running, but I came in once it was initially established. At CRA, I had my first engagement with HP as we were developing RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) processors. This job taught me how to communicate and help people understand complex items as we were training HP and others to use RISC. The most important thing I learned at CRA was assertiveness/standing up for yourself. Here, I was still young and didn’t have any gray hair, so people sometimes thought I didn’t know much. I also learned about strategy, as the business was newly started, and we were trying to grow it and make it functional. 

Entrepreneurship Takeoff

At CRA we worked with HP, Intel, and Apple, as well as other smaller companies. CRA was focused on a combination of training and actual development work. Here, I realized that I was good at taking complex things and making them simple. The software I worked on was all about putting a face onto technology that was uncomfortable to many people at that time. I liked taking concepts and ideas and turning them into commercially successful ideas. This is where my entrepreneurship bug started to take off. After my time at CRA, I went off and started my own company called Millenium RAND (Research and Development), whose mission was to help innovators who had ideas but needed help making them real. This entailed going in with clients who had a raw idea but didn’t have the people, skillsets, and confidence to make something out of it. This is where I started to build my reputation as I did everything from debugging hardware boards, writing embedded apps, writing user interfaces, etc. I had a couple of subcontractors and a couple of employees and ended up creating many products. One product called Thumbscan won the product of the year award at COMDEX. After creating this product, I was hired on by an entity funded by venture capitalists and ended up creating another product of the year award the following year. 

Summary

At this point I had been involved in going to a startup, watching a startup get launched, launching my own company, and joining an entity funded by venture capitalists. Eventually, Thumbscan got sold off, and the founders of the product recruited me to work on another idea around supercomputers. This company was called Teraplex, which was a supercomputer company based on a new process called MISC, or minimal instruction set computer. The company was initially funded by the state of Illinois and some angel investors, and I came in as the president of the company. It was here that I first learned how to deal with angel investors and was able to secure additional funding for the company. Teraplex was quite successful and I was also able to secure some technology licensing agreements. Looking back at it all, I found that my skillset was taking an idea and turning it into an innovative product, and that is what I built my career off of.