My journey to A* was an interesting one, indeed. I had been programming for about 4 years consistently. Upon graduating from high school, I started doing freelance web design work for a small Southern California based hosting and design company while going to school. It worked out well, and my passion for web design (and my skillset) grew stronger over the years.

After 2 years of programming I decided I wanted a different kind of challenge and moved myself, my 1984 Jeep, and most of my belongings to Salinas, California to be a youth pastor intern for several months. It was good experience, but I desperately missed programming, and looked for ways to fill the void. After the internship had ended I wanted to stay in the area a little longer, so I looked for opportunities to stay up there (not an easy task, as Salinas has been rated among the most expensive places in the US to live due to the ridiculous housing inflation.)

The opportunity I found to stay in the area was a…hmm…unique opportunity. I found a ranch that was looking for a caretaker to live there. Having been born in Texas, but raised in California (and having no real experience with anything the ranch lifestyle requires), I thought it would be a good way to reconnect with my roots, to do some “hands-on” work. I took the job and immediately moved in to apartment built into the side of the barn. I would get up every morning before the sun, feed the animals, and take care of whatever work needed to be done. It was good work, if not a little tiring.

The bad thing about ranch work is that there’s no money in it. You have to work VERY hard just to be able to break even, and I was spending $500/month on rent for a small one-bedroom furnished apartment in a barn and doing all of the ranch work for just $5/hour. That wasn’t going to pay the bills, so I hooked up with the company that I’d started freelancing for several years ago. Now I was ranching in the morning, trying to go to school in the afternoons, and freelancing in the evening. It was a hectic lifestyle.

After a few months of this, it was really time for a change. I’d started dating one of the ranch-owners daughters (David might remember her as “Candle Girl”, and the word “Crazy” is not too strong a term here) and the owner of the ranch was imposing weird rules and freaked out when I dented the ranch tractor (another blog post for another time). I saw all signs pointing to “RUN AWAY!”, so one dark night I began to look for job postings online.

I’d never done this before, so I wasn’t too sure what to look for, but I loaded up monster.com and began looking for programming jobs. Among the thousands and thousands of job postings, I found one that especially caught my eye. It was weird and sort of unclear, definitely different. It quoted Gandhi and talked about Google’s 20% personal project rule. I thought this was all very cool, so I worked all night on putting up an online portfolio and resumé posting, and sent my application off at 5am. By 9pm that evening, I had a response from the Company’s owner (El Jefe). We had some further rounds of e-mail, and then I was offered the job by 10pm. It all seemed so easy.

This was a sure sign that I was to leave, so I broke it off with Candle Girl, said my obligatory good byes, and got out. I drove down to Southern California a few days later, and after a weekend of settling back in, found the building and started work at A*.

Even given the crazy girlfriend, web designer turned youth pastor turned rancher, dented tractors, and angry ranch owners, I had no idea that the weirdest part of my story hadn’t even happened yet…

Just a quick note: we’ve updated our design to make it even easier for you to participate in the discussions we have here at HNT, and also moved to a new server. Enjoy!

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic blog entry today entitled The Secret of the Web wherein he outlines the dangers of start-up companies who pitch their ideas, and then work as hard they can for a brief period of time to make the idea go big. To use a quote from Mr. Godin:

“I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.”

Using the “make it big, fast” mentality, if your site goes big, you’re a success without hardly having to try. If it fails (in that short period of time) call it a bad idea, blame it on your users, call the market “not ready” and move on. Ad infinitum.

I guess this is the reason we started this blog, really. David and I saw this happening before our very eyes, but by the time we recognized what was happening, we were too late. Had we launched our flagship product, been humble about our growth and fostered healthy community around a needed service, we could have made it.

However, just as the article indicates, we were trapped in an unhealthy mindset. We wanted to be good, and we wanted it now, but things just don’t work that way.

Over the next few months we’re going to chronicle exactly what that looked like for us. To be honest, we had both “the right way” and “the wrong way” right in front of us, and (call if lack of inexperience, overexcitement, or what have you) we took the latter.  Give the article a try, and then subscribe to our feed to watch what that looked like for us, and how we would have prevented it.

My experience at A* was certainly an eclectic one from the start to say the least, but the decision to join the company was not one that was made overnight. El Jefe, the company’s founder, was someone that I had worked with before. When I was in college he had co-founded another company, a web development and marketing company, which basically was where I began my career. His passion at the time was in web marketing and specifically in search engine marketing and optimization. Eventually this facet of online marketing became a passion of mine as well.

After a couple years of working with El Jefe and his company, things began to unravel a bit, especially in terms of tension and animosity that seemed to arise between El Jefe and his business partner. Eventually El Jefe severed ties with the company he co-founded to pursue projects on his own, and I too left the company. Despite the schism that broke apart this company, which is no longer in existence, my relationship with El Jefe remained strong as both a good friend and a mentor. I felt at the time that he had patience and a long-term vision when it came to each and every project he worked on, whether it was for a client or an internal project.

This is what seemed to separate El Jefe from his business partner who struck me as an Internet-business equivalent of a used car salesmen – impatient, always looking for loopholes and shortcuts to easy money, and simply being out of touch with sound, long-term business strategies and ideas. These business partners often worked on projects independently of each even though they were within the same company, and while El Jefe projects didn’t always involve making money within a matter of days, they all showed a mature insight into the ultimate goals and business models for each one.

Meanwhile, his partner’s projects resulted in him working on something for a couple days straight, pushing it live, and then after a couple days if it didn’t make any money the project would then be terminated before moving on to something else rather than seeing it through. For me, this mature insight was one of the main reasons that made me really respect and trust the decisions and leadership that El Jefe brought to the table.

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After that broad introduction, it’d be best to start back from the beginning. Coming up in the next day or so - an interview with both people running this site.

This is a good place to start because both David and Brian came from pretty weird circumstances to wind up in the same place together. They both individually believed before joining the team that coming to company (Which we’ll refer to as A* from now on…) was going to be a step towards stability and normalcy, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

The next posts will reveal where they both started out, how they came to find out about A*, and where their lives would soon lead…

With soaring IPOs and boatloads of venture capital to be had for sharp entrepreneurs, there are tons of ideas, websites, and applications that make it, and make it big. But there are many other individuals and companies that don’t make it. We fall into the latter category. Although our ideas were exciting and unique, our passion was undeniable, and we had the ambition to truly change the world, our beloved ideas sadly did not come to fruition. We were young and inexperienced, but we had a professional experience that was unlike any other, which many people that knew us couldn’t even believe.

Our journey in living the tech start-up life began in Orange County, CA, specifically in Yorba Linda. With only a handful of people, a few refurbished iMacs, and a tiny office outfitted with bright retina-burning red carpet, we met in an unusual but similar way to help forge a new company under a young but charismatic owner. While we had internal projects that remained on the back burner, we paid the bills by developing and marketing a handful of websites for mainly small businesses that helped us bide the time until we could focus solely on out passion projects…and make it big.
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