Still Holding On

So the doldrums seem to continue to a certain extent. I have been doing some application clean-up and some reach-out to funding folk, but everything is quite quiet. So, that means I'm also putting some resumes out to the usual suspects.

I guess in retrospect, the schedule I've kept over the past year has pretty much met my guess of the most likely path forward. I still think my venture concept is a strong one, and look how much stuff I've accomplished. However, my inability to find other collaborators has in large part been due to the pervasive fear people with families have about the economy. It's not very common for someone to want to drop their job and throw their lot in on a new venture once they are over 30 I think. People get too comfortable.

That's a good lesson for the future too perhaps, find myself a new grad with lots of enthusiasm, and a short list of dependencies. My success in planning ahead gives me the flexibility to skip a salary for a year here or there without feeling it. My scales balance freetime for my own intellectual exploration pretty highly against my normal 6 figure salary. Some people don't see life that way.

Taking some chances certainly gives you more of a sense of being alive. I think about some of those six year stretches I've done in the same job, and realize it all goes by pretty fast. When you're doing something more risky, you notice every month that goes by and you feel like you've gotten a lot more out of it.

So I think if I count venture concepts I've pursued at least for a short time, this is probably my 4th or 5th, including a couple hardware concepts that I explored on the side. Hell maybe 6th. But there have been two with substantial year plus investments and teams. One with a small virtual team that didn't go anywhere, and a three that took many hours of my time over a year or two on evenings and weekends. What does that add up to?

Theoretically, the bandied-around wisdom is that one in ten attempts succeeds. So perhaps I'm due. I just would hope that I could get my one success somewhere in the middle of the ten, so that the next few to complete the group were well funded failures, rather than underfunded failures.

I'm certainly not counting this one out yet though. If nothing else, I'm sitting on a patent from the investigations involved. Perhaps that will get me fifty bucks somewhere down the road.

Researchinator hangs in but is looking for somewhere to land as well...