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A few friends are doing this and it seems suitably cathartic to look back...
December 31st 1999? Wow, I remember it like it was yesterday of course, well, maybe not quite yesterday. But after a year of making plan after plan, we ended up staying at home in Surbiton and I cooked.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pmcray came round and stayed sober until midnight when he demonstrated that the much feared Y2K bug had not brought the mobile phone networks he was covering to their knees and we hit the scotch.
I was unhappily employed as a recruitment consultant and still entertaining ideas of writing. Within a few months, however, I'd talked myself into a job as Sales Manager for a UK offshoot of a dot com company and was helping to set up the first WAP test facility in the world. It must be true, I still have the T-Shirt :)
When that bombed, I sold the outfit to a customer and joined them, getting married (twice) along the way and ultimately I got the call that the deal was done while lying next to a pool in South Africa the day before the wedding. The job offered us a move to the US and in June 2001 M and I headed off to the Bay Area where we settled into a lovely flat overlooking the Bay, I met many stalwarts of the BASFA and generally had a rocking 3 months right up until Osama Bin Laden fucked it all up. Within a month of that, our VCs invoked the Material Change clause in the funding and the company, and our visas vanished.
We spent the last few months of 2001 stuck back at home with my mum grieving for the lost life style, the lost money and soon for M's lost mother who succumbed to cancer in the December.
I got a new job early in 2001, which took us out to Bath. M took an MBA. Started working for a major bank and we bought a place in Ealing. I started travelling for a living as I focused on winning a major new account for my employers in the Pacific North West. Work was slow to pick up commission wise, but by 2005 I was one of the best performing sales people in the company, and by 2006 I'd closed one of the largest single deals ever done. I was flying London-Seattle every 3 weeks, not including other US and European trips and it was killing me. When the offer to move to Seattle came we took it (there was an alternate universe where we worked in New York but that didn't happen)...
M started working for the Beast of Redmond, I still traveled, a LOT, and did deals with all sorts of cool mobile companies, but I was getting bored as hell by it all. I'd had an idea in 2007 about a better way to handle Mobile to Server communications so, after a particularly bad few days with the new company management, I found that I had resigned... (another long story that a piece of paper in the files next to me says I can't tell)...
Anyway, it was April 2009 and I was starting a new business. It would have been perfect if M hadn't been laid off on the 5th May (Cinco de Fireo as they called it here) - anyway - that was a blip and she found something else and at the end of 2009 we launched Viafo.
As we close 2010, we have customers, we have a pipeline, we might, gods and the fates willing have some Venture Funding coming which will be interesting.
If you'd told me a couple of years ago that we'd have been able to survive 6 months with no income and then a year on one income I'd have laughed. We did it. And I hope the investment pays off.
I'm heavier than I'd like, but lighter than I was 1 year ago. My eyesight is finally catching the rest of me in my 40s, which is to say that I am increasingly finding myself having to take off my glasses to read things...
Oh and along the way we got 2 furkids - Tyson, a daddies boy if ever there was one, and Tara, the not quite a puppy any more...
Happy New Year all and may the next 10 rock!
December 31st 1999? Wow, I remember it like it was yesterday of course, well, maybe not quite yesterday. But after a year of making plan after plan, we ended up staying at home in Surbiton and I cooked.
pmcray came round and stayed sober until midnight when he demonstrated that the much feared Y2K bug had not brought the mobile phone networks he was covering to their knees and we hit the scotch.I was unhappily employed as a recruitment consultant and still entertaining ideas of writing. Within a few months, however, I'd talked myself into a job as Sales Manager for a UK offshoot of a dot com company and was helping to set up the first WAP test facility in the world. It must be true, I still have the T-Shirt :)
When that bombed, I sold the outfit to a customer and joined them, getting married (twice) along the way and ultimately I got the call that the deal was done while lying next to a pool in South Africa the day before the wedding. The job offered us a move to the US and in June 2001 M and I headed off to the Bay Area where we settled into a lovely flat overlooking the Bay, I met many stalwarts of the BASFA and generally had a rocking 3 months right up until Osama Bin Laden fucked it all up. Within a month of that, our VCs invoked the Material Change clause in the funding and the company, and our visas vanished.
We spent the last few months of 2001 stuck back at home with my mum grieving for the lost life style, the lost money and soon for M's lost mother who succumbed to cancer in the December.
I got a new job early in 2001, which took us out to Bath. M took an MBA. Started working for a major bank and we bought a place in Ealing. I started travelling for a living as I focused on winning a major new account for my employers in the Pacific North West. Work was slow to pick up commission wise, but by 2005 I was one of the best performing sales people in the company, and by 2006 I'd closed one of the largest single deals ever done. I was flying London-Seattle every 3 weeks, not including other US and European trips and it was killing me. When the offer to move to Seattle came we took it (there was an alternate universe where we worked in New York but that didn't happen)...
M started working for the Beast of Redmond, I still traveled, a LOT, and did deals with all sorts of cool mobile companies, but I was getting bored as hell by it all. I'd had an idea in 2007 about a better way to handle Mobile to Server communications so, after a particularly bad few days with the new company management, I found that I had resigned... (another long story that a piece of paper in the files next to me says I can't tell)...
Anyway, it was April 2009 and I was starting a new business. It would have been perfect if M hadn't been laid off on the 5th May (Cinco de Fireo as they called it here) - anyway - that was a blip and she found something else and at the end of 2009 we launched Viafo.
As we close 2010, we have customers, we have a pipeline, we might, gods and the fates willing have some Venture Funding coming which will be interesting.
If you'd told me a couple of years ago that we'd have been able to survive 6 months with no income and then a year on one income I'd have laughed. We did it. And I hope the investment pays off.
I'm heavier than I'd like, but lighter than I was 1 year ago. My eyesight is finally catching the rest of me in my 40s, which is to say that I am increasingly finding myself having to take off my glasses to read things...
Oh and along the way we got 2 furkids - Tyson, a daddies boy if ever there was one, and Tara, the not quite a puppy any more...
Happy New Year all and may the next 10 rock!
