4 Minute Read

Happy Friday, and this is the third installment of Nobody Cares Maybe It Was Destiny.

Preface and Chapter 1
Chapter 2

IT WAS SCOTT EDWARDS (AND PLEATHER, AND PEET KRAKOW)   
Sure, I like music, the gear for it, and later, I even connected a computer to a TV.  Big fucking deal. 

None of that would have mattered if I didn't want to - deep, deep down - start my own business.  But where did that desire really come from, beyond doing the business card playtime thing as a child?

Where it decidedly did not come from was my own parents.  Sure, that's my father on the cover, but what we ended up sharing professionally was technology for the home and office, not entrepreneurship. 

Let me put it another way:  He worked 37 years for the phone company. 

Mom?  While she may have become the president of a successful non-profit late in life, and was certainly domineering and bossy enough to be one, like Dad, she was no entrepreneur.   

No, the courage and drive to start a business from scratch came from the late Scott Edwards. 

A comprehensive explanation of my mercurial friend, his life, and my small part in it would itself take volumes. 

Instead, I will summarize by saying I participated in two start-up companies with Scott, one of which I cofounded with him (the fax services [!] company Epigraphx, mentioned previously).  It was at his literal footsteps that I saw what I wanted and also what was involved in starting a business. 

Working with my mentor Scott ignited an entrepreneurial fire in me that I didn't know existed.  Layer on his lavish lifestyle (something I already coveted in the mid-1980s) and I was hooked.

Pleather and Peet?  My former WestConnect partners, whom I had left in 1999, about a year after coming back from London?  Their role in the path I'd follow was more negative, but no less important.

Simply stated, being partners with them mostly pissed me off (them too!).  Rightly or wrongly, I did not like the compromises I often had to make, either to keep the peace among us, or get something done.  And if I'm being honest, even Scott Edwards and I had butted heads enough that I knew by this point I wanted to start and run a business myself. 

It all reinforced what Arthur had said:  I wouldn't be truly satisfied until I did something on my own. 

Or as I was wont to say back then:  If I want the business cards blue, they're going to be blue.
 

But what was that business going to be?

MR. DIGITAL CASA INTEGRATION

During this period of our lives, Scott and I would talk fairly often, at least once per quarter, and often for 2 or more hours.  We would discuss various topics, and at this point, our relationship was still very much teacher/student, despite him only being a few years older.  

A business idea we knocked around in 2000 and 2001 would change that. Scott, a full-on audiophile (I'm talking McIntosh tube amps and $50,000 Focal Utopia speakers, FFS), was himself frustrated with finding professional technicians to address everything digital in his home:  new broadband Internet connections, his big music system, and also a front projection home theater.

It should be noted that there was a sea change underway at this time, in terms of home communications and home entertainment.  Napster and MP3 files were transforming music consumption, broadband Internet and early WiFi were together opening up entirely new frontiers, and flat panel TVs were moving from The Jetsons to everywhere.  And surround sound was making the living room a newly immersive and exciting place to be.

It was Scott Edwards who saw something in all of this.  He said the world needed a Mr. Digital or a Digital Milkman.  

My mind stayed in overdrive on this idea for months, before and after being cut loose by Schwab.  

What if I could combine my professional consulting background with my passion for all things home electronic?  Especially now that everything pointed to the final wave of the digital revolution, one that would see tube TVs, CDs, and flip phones go the way of the steam engine?

What if I could turn a hobby into a business?  

After the Schwab layoff, and while going through the motions of a job search, I bore down on the idea and made some notes.  I also developed a brand for my non-existent business.  These are snippets of the original 2001 documents.

I had no money for a designer and this was decades before you could just have an AI engine create a logo for your new business.   What follows is another example of why I am writing this:  Anyone can do it, but you have to try. 

Using Microsoft's old warhorse Visio, I got busy.  I added blue stripes, and I love telling the (true) story it is the same shade of blue as on the 2002 US Winter Olympic Team uniforms.  I would also add a tagline.

Believe it or not, homemade or not, I used this branding up until almost the very end, and it remains a favorite of any I've created, despite itself.

The vision for the business?  Again, from the original documents, here it was.  Not bad for 2001.

JUST DO IT (AND DON'T FUCK UP THESE INCREDIBLE ADVANTAGES)
While there are many reasons I am sharing this story, one is to highlight what it takes to start and operate a company successfully.  It's not for the faint of heart and you need every advantage; most start-ups fail in part because their founders lack the true balls it takes.  That applies to women founders, too.

And/or they're not lucky.  That also applies to women founders.

For me, I had courage and was also incredibly lucky, especially in one way.  From the beginning up until its ending fizzle, the single biggest factor in the success documented here was this:

That is my wife Julie, in Munich in the summer of 2002 at the dawn of all of this and this is no gooey love note to her.  It is the hard-boiled reality that none of what follows would have happened without her.

Because apart from the anticipated moral support, she was responsible for two things that made starting a business feasible:

Add in my 6 month severance check from Schwab (it's how we justified the already-planned trip above), no kids to feed, and Julie knowing - like Arthur - that this was what I was destined to do, it was a solid go from her.  That meant everything.

By my high school reunion over Thanksgiving weekend of 2001, the two of us had already talked the idea to death, so it was done.  I was not going to look for a job and I was going to launch Casa Integration.

We agreed I'd bootstrap it, so there would be no investors, informal or formal.  Hand-to-mouth it was, but look at those advantages!  Because of them, Julie crucially said we'd take it one year at a time, meaning we'd revisit Casa Integration's viability each year on January 1.   

I now had my chance to start something, from scratch, and would be able to call it my own.  It was something I wanted tremendously.  Indeed, more than anything I had ever wanted, at least professionally. 

That was vital, because the next 2+ years were mostly one long nadir.

Next:  THERE'S JUST ONE PROBLEM

Thank you for reading this newsletter.  

Evergreen on KLUF and featuring the all-important "Every Home is Wired," here is the other-worldly Porcupine Tree and their Killer and aptly titled Signify.