How to know if you’re an entrepreneur

Here’s an interview of me in Inc. magazine. John Warrilow did the interview. The topic was how to know if you’re an entrepreneur. I basically said that you know you’re an entrepreneur if you are crazy, in a manic way, and you are willing to risk the health of your family and have no chance of a stable income, ever.

Then John sent his book to me. It’s called Built to Sell. It turns out that John did a startup and he sold it, and his book is, basically, how to be so smart about doing a startup that you are aiming for a reasonable, not-pie-in-the-sky exit from day one.

I spend a lot of time talking about how startup life is completely crazy, and the founders are crazy for choosing it. But in fact, the lower-stakes, lower-risk entrepreneurship, where, instead of having investors, you use your own time and energy to make money on the side while you are doing other things – that’s a great way to structure a life.

Ramit Sethi has great advice on how to do this. Its called Earn $1K On the Side. And now I bet a ton of you are going to sign up for his program, and I should have negotiated beforehand to get a cut of whatever he earns from this post. But I am stuck thinking about insanely risky businesses with high reward and so I forget to do things like earn $300 when it’s just sitting there. Read more

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Goat cheese is the new veal

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I have two new goats.

In a nod to Tom Sawyer and his fence, I told my sons the goats are for me only, and I want to take care of them. When my sons thought of 100 names for each goat, I told them that the person who takes care of the goats gets to name the goats.

So the goats are named Samuel and Snowflake. And I am supervising feeding instead of feeding.

I know you’re not supposed to name farm animals you are planning to eat. But last summer my son bottle fed a calf that did not have a mom to take care of it, and now my son seems to be fine with the idea of killing the calf. Read more

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Women don’t want to do startups. They want children.

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This was originally posted on TechCrunch. My company, Brazen Careerist, is moving from Madison, WI, to Washington, DC, where our new CEO lives. Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn’t know it would be hell. It’s my third startup. Read more

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Brazen Careerist opens an office in DC

Brazen Careerist is opening offices in Washington, DC. Our CEO lives in DC, so Ryan Healy is moving there — along with Photis, the developer (who I convinced to move from Philadelpia to Madison by telling him that his life would suck and he would die a slow, painful career death if he did not come work at Brazen Careerist and he said forget it and slammed the car door in my face, but then he moved to Madison anyway.)

You’d think I’d be panicking that the center of the company is shifting to DC. But really, I have been aiming to remove myself from the center of the company for a while. Read more

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How to take intelligent risks

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Recently, I covered my hallway in wallpaper I bought online (via Wallpaper Weekly). Everyone I showed the wallpaper to said the it would be too busy a pattern. But I loved it. So I bought it anyway.

There are a lot of problems with my hallway now — most notably, I used Elmer’s glue instead of wallpaper paste and I’m going to have to pull down the wallpaper and start over. But every time I walk through my hall, I think about how important it is to take risks with my house — because that’s what makes it mine. Which, of course, is very similar to a life. You can live someone eles’s tried-and-true template for a life, or you can make your life your own. Read more

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How to get good ideas for startups

The majority of people in the US would like to be self-employed, according to Dartmouth economist, David Blanchflower. This makes sense because people who work for themselves are happier than people who work at someone else’s company, according to research from Estaban Calvo at the Harvard School of Public Health. However the majority are not self-employed, and one of the most important reasons for this is that people do not know how to come up with an idea for a business.

1. Read all the time, among broad sources and materials.
In a study spanning sixty years of economically underprivileged Harvard graduates, psychiatrist George Valliant concluded (in a great article in the Atlantic) that the only consistent indicator of who will be happy later in life is who did chores as a child.

This information should make almost everyone happy, since obviously just graduating from Harvard isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. It also gave me a burst of hope for our new life on the farm. The type of farm we live on has big cash flow and little incomes. I’m not sure if this qualifies us for the Harvard study demographic, but just in case, my kids do a lot of chores. They take care of farm animals and get rewarded with computer time. Not quite American Gothic. But still, maybe a path to happiness.

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Thanksgiving drama on steroids: Adding a family business to the mix

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I think its safe to say that for the majority of people, Thanksgiving is not about goodness and gratitude, but rather, family drama.

Until now, I have been pretty much on the outside of this American tradition: The tradition of building up Thanksgiving to be a great family moment and then the family not living up to it. But everyone still does Thanksgiving basically because they love their parents. I'm not gonna say here that I don't love my parents. But it's a special kind of love that does not involve being with them for holidays.

But this year is a big switch for me, because I'm doing Thanksgiving family drama—with the farmer. There is family drama because the farmer has three sisters who think I have a morality problem. Like I don't have morals.

In fact, the whole family thinks this, and those with Internet connections print out blog posts about sex acts and send them, via US mail, to less connected family members. The outcry crosses state boundaries from Wisconsin to Illinois, and sometimes, I think they are googling terms like Penelope Trunk and sex. I mean, it's not easy to find the stuff they are finding.

Wait. You are wondering, right? What they're finding? Here. Here's a list of some links. And, now no one has to do any morally-compromising searches. It's all right here: Read more

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How to find the right job for you

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We reorganized the company today. We brought in a new, interim CEO, who's not me. For many entrepreneurs, that is their worst nightmare.

But I couldn't be happier. For one thing, it's a sign that my company, Brazen Careerist, is doing well. Remember when the company was running out of money and my electricity was getting turned off? There was no one worrying then that I was the wrong person for the CEO position. No one cared because it looked like we were going under.

But then the media started talking about how we could be LinkedIn for Gen Y and we started moving fast. I don't worry about of money anymore, and we are moving at a faster speed because we can see where we are going, how we'll make money, and how we'll grow the community.

1. Know where your strengths are.
The thing that makes me great is my writing. I have spent my whole life writing, constantly trying to figure out how to earn money writing. My favorite thing I've ever written is this blog. I adore the conversation, I adore the format, the never-ending research, and the self-referential links, because that's how my mind works: connecting random stuff together all the time trying to figure out the best path to happiness. Blogging is my dream-come-true media. Read more

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All-new launch for my company. Hooray!

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My company just launched, all-new, at BrazenCareerist.com. For those of you who have been asking for the past year: “What’s your business model?” You can read about it on TechCrunch. If you want the full pitch, you can read the press release, (and you should know that all last week, when I wasn’t blogging, I was writing six thousand versions of our press release.)

Here’s some advice for everyone who is starting a company: Write your big press release first, before you do anything at all. And then work backwards. Map out the milestones you need to make the press release come true, and that tells you how to run the first stage of your startup.

To be clear: we did not do that. I mean, if we did, our press release would have had to say, “Ryan Paugh announces that he has just made it through two years of Ryan Healy and Penelope Trunk fighting tooth and nail over totally irrelevant details of building a social network that is a career management tool for the next generation workforce.”

Then Ryan Healy and I would rewrite that press release ten times because Tech Crunch announced that they are sick of people using the term “next generation” and Ryan doesn’t want to use it but I think it’s fine because it’s in a different context. (LinkedIn is for gen x. Brazen Careerist is the job site for the next generation, demographically speaking. ) Read more

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How to face cash-flow issues in a start-up

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When I launched my company, Wired magazine contacted me to write a column about how to run a start-up. The editor, Dylan Tweney, blew me away with his offer. It wasn't just that he took me to lunch in the grown-local lunchroom at Wired. He also had this unbelievable faith in me that I knew what I was doing as a CEO.

Here is a confession of lameness: I said I'd write the column and then I lost confidence. I thought I didn't know enough about running a company to give other people advice.

Since then, I’ve spent two years running a start-up in the worst funding market in decades. After insane amounts of struggling, we have raised about $1 million, and for the first time, I do not feel panicked about keeping the company in business. We will have to raise more money, but I can see the path to that, and I think I can do it.

At the same time, I had a recent flurry of outside affirmation: Psychology Today featured me as a person who has outstanding resilience, and Self magazine is featuring me in their August “success” issue. So even though I squandered my opportunity to have a column in Wired, I am ready to give advice about how to run a start-up.

I'm going to answer the question people ask me most often: “What do I do when my company is out of money?”

Here is the answer: Read more

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