Knowing that this url was going to be published in Inc. alongside an article I wrote there gave me a deadline for taking the password off of this blog and readying it for public consumption. Until now, I have been blogging as a somewhat desultory means of communicating with assorted interested parties about a business I’m in the process of launching.
Since that business, Kerabu, Inc., involves some proprietary technology that’s my patent attorney won’t let me talk about unless you sign an NDA (and he’s not too keen on it even then), I’ve purged a bit of the juicy parts from previous posts.
I can say that Kerabu is about assembling the tools necessary to start small businesses and presenting them in an online environment. The specific tools are proprietary, but the discussion surrounding the need for such a business is wide open. And to my surprise, what’s left is possibly a more interesting blog, as it’s now a discussion of the state of entrepreneurialism in the world today--and on a more intimate level, it will probably also evolve into an object lesson in why 41 year-old single mothers seldom found startups.
When I started down this path my mother said to me, “You know this will become all-consuming, and I wonder if you’ll be unhappy that you aren’t writing novels.” My immediate response to her was, “But it is a novel! It’s exactly the same thing.” See, from the first moment I can remember, I wanted to be a novelist, and I succeeded in that ambition, but by the time I got there, I found that novels didn’t occupy the same place in the world’s consciousness that they did when I was a child. The writers of my generations weren’t concerned with big, universe-shaping acts of creation, but with posturing—their books were purposefully obscure, irritatingly coy style statements. It took me another twenty years to figure out where the “novel” ideas were in my era: in business.
The path I took to get there was circuitous and serendipitous. Briefly, ten years ago I was writing a humorous parenting column for the late Buzz Magazine. An editor at a financial magazine called Worth rang me up and asked me if I’d write a review of some children’s financial products. Later, another Worth editor took a chance and hired me to interview the founder of Intuit, Scott Cook, and write something about what Quicken means. It was while interviewing the brilliant, expansive, maniacally inspired Cook that I had an epiphany that went something like this: Oh my God, so here’s where all my generation’s Norman Mailers are! Seven years later, I found myself interviewing eBay’s Meg Whitman, who Worth had just named the best CEO in the country. In the intervening years I’d received a pretty thorough socratic education from some impressive teachers.
But I might not have put it all together and made the leap to starting my own company if my Dad hadn’t done so first. He has spent the last twenty years as the founder of various technology startups (a story I chronicled here). And his background was in fine art. But he happened to design a better way to create multi-layer, laser-programmable circuit boards one day while doodling on a napkin, and got some venture capital to make it happen. He hasn’t looked back (or up) since, and now holds more patents than I have shoes (and I'm an Imelda in training). Currently, he's working on semiconductor test equipment here, among other things. My dad still considers himself an artist, and so do I. What do artists do, after all? They think. Everything else is just a question of genre.
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