And this time it’s business that has broken my heart.

I have a friend (or one of those “business acquaintance” types, since he doesn’t really know me outside of my role at Simpli) who is starting up a wireless ISP. He wants to be the Wal-Mart of wireless and target suburban areas that don’t already have DSL or cable modems. I think it’s a good business idea, but his business is much like mine in that there is a lot of competition. What happens when those areas he targets with his wireless company get DSL or cable modems? What happens when customers need more than 6Mbit bi-directional? (This will come more quickly than anyone wants to imagine.) There are a lot of “what-ifs” with his business.

Knowing him, he will probably be successful. It’s incredibly frustrating, though, when I have a company that makes well into 5 figures every month, and I am really struggling to find investors to invest even $10,000 into my business. Contrast this with him–he has this “napkin idea” of a wireless ISP, which has 0 customers and 0 revenue, and he’s already received $235,000 in investments for his company. I want investors to help Simpli become the front-runner in distributed computing to achieve true 100% website and email uptime, and, while I do have some investors who are interested, I don’t know when the checks will actually come in.

In the meantime, AboveNet is having some of the worst issues I’ve ever seen. They’ve had three outages in 5 days. I’m ready to move out and get a new location with multiple network providers so we don’t have to be chained to them. I feel stuck, however, because we don’t have all the money I need to invest in the new location to make it totally 100% redundant. That’s where the investments come in, but it seems the potential investors I talk to all say “That’s a great idea, but I don’t have the money right now. Sorry.” And another door closes on my dreams.

No one out there takes it harder than me when we have an outage. I wear it as a personal badge of pride that Simpli has fantastic uptime. When we’re down, and especially when it’s completely out of my control, there’s nothing I can do but answer unhappy phone calls from customers. Half of them berate me and threaten to leave and half of them seem to want to hang out on the phone forever and ask me questions until it’s back online. Some of them say things like “This is unacceptable.” Do you think I don’t know that? Do you not realize that every cell in my body wants to go down to the damn datacenter myself and reboot whatever switch or router it is that has fallen over this time? Believe me, whatever pain your business is feeling, I’m feeling it 200 times worse, because I have hundreds of customers upset with me (even though no outage this week has been our fault.)

We are ready to move. I have everything in line. I’m waiting for one or two investments to make it happen. I have a meeting with a couple potential investors tomorrow, so I will hopefully close something. This has just been a very rough day for me. One potential investor finally backed out, saying (how many times have I heard this?) “Yes, I’m interested, but I don’t have the money.” When I expressed disappointment, he actually had the nerve to say “Don’t stop prospecting just because you’ve had someone [him, in this case] say ‘yes’.” Perhaps I just have too much faith and trust in others, and I have to learn the hard way that hardly anyone ever follows through with what they say they’re going to do. Cases in point: Not only him, but AboveNet, who guarantees 100% network uptime. Cheers to that. 🙁

Since a couple of you are wondering what went on last night, I’m going to blog it in a way that doesn’t single out one person. This is actually a disappointing trend that I’ve been noticing lately, and I want to capture it in a blog without really railroading a single person.

The #1 thing people like about me is my passion and energy. (Technically, those may be two things, but with me, they go together.) Although I do have my down moments (and sometimes days), in general, when you meet me you’ll meet one of the most enthusiastic, passionate people out there. I’m always excited about something. I’m blessed to be an idea person, which means that I will spontaneously throw new ideas into a conversation, and I’m able to see obvious gaps in a market that you or I can exploit to make money. This is what my friends love about me. Some of you really get into the energy that drives me every day and have committed to helping me see through my ideas. My favorite of you are the realists who know me well, but also know when to shoot down an idea. Here’s a great example:

This weekend, I went to IBI. Of course, IBI is full of idea people, so we toss around tons of stuff. One of my more recent ideas popped up there. What if I did a lunch club, with no more than 10 or 15 people, and we targeted small business owners and entrepreneurs? Have 2 people come in and pay $100 each to be speakers and be guaranteed personal connections and networking with the 10 other people, who get a free lunch. Cool, huh? I gave this idea to a couple people at IBI and everyone agreed this was a neat idea, but it wouldn’t be big enough for me to really explore. At most, I’d make $150 a week after paying for everyone’s lunch. This is a great example of the kind of stuff I go through on a daily basis. (I’ll try to blog more of these as I have them so some of you can pick up and explore ones that resonate with you.)

I love the energy I get from other idea people. I feed off it. Often, we end up at a whiteboard, furiously drawing circles to represent market segments and calculating how much money is involved. Of course, being around only idea people and generating ideas all the time is exhausting, and that’s where the team members come in… the execution will rest on their shoulders, and they’ll take an idea and run with it. The idea people and the execution people are totally different people; idea people often have a hard time focusing and we usually have 3 or 4 business ideas in various stages of execution at a time. The execution people are here to make sure the really good ideas do stick to the wall by actually forcing us to sit down and set goals instead of moving on to the Next Big Thing. C is a great example of an excellent execution team leader; he brings some reality back into my life by telling me to settle down and get on with it instead of bouncing around like crazy.

Hardcore geeks and idea people don’t always mix. Geeks tend to be very negative about anything new or changing, and they also tend to have a really tough time gauging the size of a market. Furthermore, they like to use rational analysis to shoot things down, as this proves how intelligent they are. (It doesn’t matter that sometimes they’re dead wrong about what they’re shooting down, or they have no personal experience in a specific area.) For instance, remember when the iPod came out? Slashdot was full of geeks saying “Lame!” Guess what… the iPod has been, unquestionably, one of the most successful MP3 players out there.

In a similar vein, there are a few people out there (I hesitate to call them “friends”) who seem intent on shooting down every idea I have with “That will never work”, “If it was so easy someone else would have done it already”, etc. Inevitably, every person I know like this also happens to be a hardcore computer geek — of the type that runs some variant of Linux on his home PC, thumbs his nose at major corporations, etc.

Realistically, I know not every idea I have will be a million-dollar money maker. A lot of my ideas aren’t even necessarily money-related; I like to evangelize things like my Treo, for instance. I’ve gotten a lot better recently about only evangelizing to people who would really benefit from my ideas. The next step I need to take is distancing my ideas from those who are overly negative about them, because all it does is throw me into a depression tailspin. Unfortunately, my predisposition to picking up energy from other people allows me to pick up negative energy as easily as positive energy. When I am around those with a negative disposition about something, or those who are skeptical about everything that isn’t already working for them, I become negative as well. This isn’t a healthy state.

Hardcore geeks and idea people, it seems, don’t mix. Perhaps I should state this as… hardcore geeks with an extremely skeptical persona (and we all know some people like that) don’t mix with idea people. Note to self: Hang out with entrepreneurs more and Linux geeks less. 🙁

SlashChick’s first review of her new Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC.

My tablet PC arrived today (Monday) after being shipped out from SoCal a couple days ago. (I knew that tracking number that said it would be delivered on Friday wasn’t telling the truth.) I unpacked it to find it lighter than I had imagined (it weighs in at somewhere around 4.5 pounds, which is definitely a step up from my 3-pound Thinkpad, but worth it.)

I opened it up, and to my dismay, pretty much the entire surface around the keyboard was covered with garish red stickers advertising different capabilities of this Tablet PC. I spent the next 10 minutes picking off stickers (3 Toshiba stickers, 1 Nvidia, 1 Energy Star, 1 Intel, and 1 Winders.) Once all the gunk was gone, I plugged it in and turned it on. I went through the Windows setup, clicked Next a bunch of times, and was dumped into XP. XP did detect my wireless network, but it’s not like it’s that challenging — it’s an access point called “default” with no encryption or security of any sort. It then prompted me to install a bunch of updates (thankfully, it comes with XP SP2 already installed) and reboot. After rebooting, I finally got my first experience with the Tablet PC interface.

The first thing that hit me was that this makes computing a lot more interesting. Along with “interesting” comes “learning curve”, as you have a pen that can perform several different functions, as well as several different (and some very weird) butons along the side of the screen. You can use these buttons in Tablet PC mode. I was too tired to figure them all out, but one of them acts as a mini-joystick, and one closes the window that’s in focus. There are also a bunch of pen motions you can do while holding down the button on the side of the pen to do things like Alt-Tab, Maximize, and New Document. I wasn’t quite expecting such a new way of doing things, so it threw me for a bit.

Back to the laptop itself. The screen is very bright (much nicer than the Thinkpad) and the 1400×1050 resolution is definitely nice. I’ll have to bump up the text to Large Fonts to really work with it, but that’s OK — that’s what I do on my home desktop too. I had a very positive experience with the keyboard. I love the tactile feel of my Thinkpad, but the darn Ctrl button isn’t in the lower left-hand corner like it should be (no, some genius at IBM made that key “Function”.) I was worried that the keyboard wouldn’t be as nice as the Thinkpad, but in fact I feel it’s even nicer — the Ctrl key is in the right place and they’ve moved the Windows key out of my way. (I use an IBM Model M “clicky” keyboard here on my home PC, and it has no Windows keys at all. I wouldn’t have it any other way!) The keyboard keys are spaced nicely and it’s really a joy to type on. The slightly bigger form factor really makes for a much nicer keyboard layout. I have small hands, but even I felt cramped on the Thinkpad sometimes. No such problems exist with the Toshiba.

I flipped the screen around and it flipped into portrait mode. This is a pretty cool feature — for those of you who are not familiar with how a convertible Tablet PC works, you grab the screen, turn it to the left, and it folds down and snaps on top of the keyboard. Toshiba’s software then orients to rotate the screen so it’s like you’re holding a real paper tablet. This is where those nifty buttons come in handy… the little joystick lets you scroll up and down, for instance. I played around with entering website URLs with the pen, and although the handwriting recognition was good, bookmarks will definitely become a lot more critical on the Tablet PC than they currently are on my desktop. Once the website was loaded, however, surfing was easy and intuitive with the pen interface and the little buttons.

My first impression of my new Toshiba M200 Tablet PC is thus summarized as follows: It has a bit of a steeper learning curve than I expected, but it looks like a great product overall. It’s definitely unique and will be very fun to take to meetings and such. The fast processor and great screen will also make it worthwhile as a standard laptop. I’m not regretting the decision to upgrade. I give it a 9/10 based on my first impression, and I will update later with additional information as I continue using it.

A few days ago, I was not feeling that great, and I decided I was sick of my current laptop.

A bit of background: A little over a year ago, I ordered my first laptop since I left Sun in 2002. I had a beautiful little Toshiba Portege when I worked at Sun, which was left over from when I worked at Cobalt. I loved my Portege while at Sun, so I figured the next logical step was to get an itty-bitty Thinkpad X-series. I got a refurbished one from PC Connection for an incredibly low price, and voila! I had my own laptop again.

However, ever since I got my second flat panel at home (I run 3200×1024 here with dual 17.3″ SGI 1600SW flat panels), the little 1024×768 12″ screen on the Thinkpad wasn’t cutting it. It just seemed so… small. Small in that disappointing way. I knew I didn’t want a 10-pound laptop, but I constantly struggled with the Thinkpad. FG had a Thinkpad T-series with a 1400×1050 (SXGA+) screen, and that worked much better for me. Still, something was holding me back from upgrading to a T-series.

I was cruising the Toshiba website a few weeks ago when I saw their new line of Tablet PCs. Tablet PCs have always appealed to me, mostly because I find a mound of sticky notes accumulating on my desk at any given time, and am constantly going through them to find phone numbers or to look at my to-do list. For some reason, a pen has always felt more natural to me than a keyboard and mouse. I’ve played with the Tablet PCs before, but until now, they’ve been stuck with low resolutions and wimpy processors, which just didn’t appeal to me.

Enter the Toshiba M200 tablet PC. The one I bought runs $1800 and includes very nice specs like my prized 1400×1050 screen and a Pentium-M 1.7GHz processor with 2MB cache. It doesn’t have quite as impressive battery life as my Thinkpad (4.5 hours vs. 5.5 hours), but it’s still long enough to work for 90% of what I need. I bought a brand-new one with a 3-year warranty instead of going refurbished like I did with the Thinkpad. The great thing is that I can sell my Thinkpad for $1000 or so and not feel too bad about splurging on a new laptop. 😉

I definitely feel like it was the right time to buy a new laptop. Whether I’ll really use the Tablet PC features remains to be seen. According to the tracking number, it should arrive tomorrow, but as the tracking statement does not contain detailed information on where the laptop actually is on its path to California, I have my doubts. I’m hoping it arrives in time for the weekend, but we shall see!

By the way, thank you for all of the emails, phone calls, and comments. I am feeling much better. I sent out a detailed email to our potential investors today about the direction I want to go with Simpli, and I believe this will make Simpli a multi-million dollar company. Another “we shall see” there. 🙂

So some of you have just read my previous blog entry and are wondering to yourselves, “Why in the world would Erica want to get into the T-shirt printing business?” There are several reasons, detailed below:

1) My biggest concern about my personal finances right now is making sure I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. To that end, I put aside some money this year to invest. (I also have an IRA that is slowly gaining funds, but for obvious reasons, cannot rely on that in a pinch.) In case Simpli goes under at some point (which is about 0.000001% likely, but still possible in some really far-out scenarios), I want to have some money stockpiled somewhere else (preferably in another business or two) so I can survive. I invested in a friend’s business earlier this year, and the T-shirt business is my second investment of 2005.

2) As far as investments are concerned, I can’t argue with $3000 for 50% of a business in which many companies legitimately make several million dollars a year. Okay, so I don’t expect our T-shirt business to be a multi-billion dollar business, but I figure if I can make enough to pay my rent ($1550/month), I’ll be doing pretty well.

3) I don’t want to take too much of a salary from Simpli at this point. Every dollar I don’t take for personal needs is a dollar that can be reinvested in Simpli to make it even more profitable. Plus, Simpli benefits from getting spiffy T-shirts at cost. (Guess what we’ll be giving away as freebies to new customers? Anyone care to guess?) 😉

4) Regarding FK’s comment “saturated/unprofitable” regarding the T-shirt industry (I swear I’m not picking on you, FK, as others have the same question on their mind.) I have two points to make about this: 1) That’s what everyone says about web hosting, too, and Simpli has been a great success there; and 2) we will have a steady customer base of frats and sororities if nothing else. I also plan to target non-profits, as well as print up some T-shirts of my own that I’ve already sketched out. Once we hire labor to do the work instead of doing it ourselves, it will become quite a profitable business. Most companies’ margins are well over 50%. Right now, we’re doing it ourselves to learn it. Soon, we’ll hire someone else to do it for $8-$10 an hour. Then it’ll be a much easier task.

It’s worth noting that the T-shirt business is certainly not an expansion or add-on to Simpli. It’s a wholly separate business, and will have a different corporation name (Twisted Tees is the working name until we file paperwork), different bank accounts, etc. I’ve talked previously about splitting Simpli into two divisions and will add separate blog entries for those two companies once I’m ready to post them on here. 🙂 Twisted Tees is, right now, a weekend/side project for some extra money that could turn into some fairly nice recurring income. We shall see!