gainfully unsalaried

September 26th will be my last salaried day- maybe ever. On or about September 29th I will co-found a new company with a partner. He and I will commit to 18 months of our time to the new as of yet unnamed company.

This will be my fourth and best attempt at a startup. The first at 16 was a network security lark of my motley crew during the time of gopher and ftp. The second came at 17 while on a break from college which turned into a serious S-Corp’d concern assembling PC clones (during the ‘clone vs. compatible’ wars) in small batches for 100 bucks a pop. I dropped this gig like a bad habit after tasting the sweet sweet paychecks managing servers for a local Fortune 500 company. A couple of years later I found myself happily slaving away in Seattle on the Windows NT core team as a lowly builder. Kernel triage was the most exciting thing I ever did other than touching Dave Cutler’s race cars. After a couple of years of this I took my ball (msft stock) and went home (St. Louis). I bet the whole ball on a my third startup right in the middle of the high-rolling dot com boom. Two years later I lost my ball (and 12 cylinder Jaguar) when the dot com bubble burst. I fled to the open arms to the biggest and best ISV, Quest Software.

Eight years and three kids later the bug has bit me again. This time I’ve found someone that fills the CEO shoes better than I. Effectively I’ll simply be an architect and developer for the first several months as we sprint to churn out a product suite. After that I’ll focus on more on the technical direction and manage R&D.

3 more weeks…