I spent five years and three months working as part of a great young team who took on media titans in online men’s publishing. That was a worthwhile experience, what made is an excellent experience was that we actually beat them.
We learned from - and beat - Dennis Publishing, Playboy Enterprises, CondeNast, Rodale, Hearst and held our own against online tsunamis like AOL Time Warner, MSN, IGN Entertainment, Walt Disney’s ESPN and many others. Sure, all of those giants had larger absolute men’s audiences, but we had carved out our little profitable niche.
As is the case in many mergers and acquisitions, last year around this time, I found myself on the outside looking in. As the sales guy in a company that was acquired by a more established online company with a tremendously deep bench, my days were numbered: I knew it, they knew it, the American people knew it.
When I had to leave, I considered getting a job somewhere else and even interviewed with one company. But when it was time to decide, I could not bring myself to join a company, help build it, only to find myself standing when the music stopped. That’s particularly a unique problems in small startups when you are not a founder: you stand up for what is right but when the music stops, everyone else has secured a seat, and you’re the odd man out.
So, I decided to start a new company. It was very hard to make that decision, and, it was a very hard thing to actually do.
To add to the challenge (yippie!), I got sued by the company I helped make a success, basically for having the audacity to move on with my life. I defended myself and won.
Despite it all…
I tell friends and family: last year I was making more money than I knew what to do with it, this year, I have no idea where the next check will come from but I would not trade it for anything. That’s no cliche, starting a company was the single best thing I could have done.
Apparently, I am not alone.
Entrepreneurship is back in vogue. Read more on Business Week (not surprisingly, the story starts off lauding the success stories of Facebook, Digg and YouTube when any true entrepreneur will tell you that “extreme success” is a nice bonus to the real merits of starting a company: freedom).
And for an interesting commentary on entrepreneurship, check this out, a nice little post on being a Parallel CEO vs. a Parallel Entrepreneur, courtesy of Fred Wilson’s blog (I’ll be writing on this later on).
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