big teddy
  • Mar
    18
    My three-fisted economic recovery package.
    by mike at 11:49am

    Alright I’m not Mark Cuban or Paul Graham I’m not a self made millionaire ready to invest in early stage startups.   What I do have is a bit of time and a few  good ideas that I’ve kind of left behind that might be able to be resurrected by a few people who may be unemployed with some time on their hands and an interest in starting a business.   These are two ideas that I started building on my own and then lost a bit of interest in.  I still think they’re viable ideas and you’ve got a headstart because a certain chunk of the early development is done.

    So in one fist I have A Different Engine my new Interactive Television application development company.   This is my bread and butter, but its a new services company with few clients right now so I might have some down time – and idle hands are the devil’s playground.  So I have two other ideas for more traditional intenet startups both these apps have working prototypes and one has been soft launched even (with no traffic ;-) .

    My goal is to really get a couple of teams up and running and then just provide whatever guidance I can.

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  • Mar
    09
    Today I quit my job
    by mike at 9:52am

    The Shivers

    Oh dear effing jebus what have i done?

    That’s the question rolling around in my head like the ball on a roulette wheel.  I just quit a great, highly paid job at one of the largest companies in the US, in likely the worst economy of my life in order to start an application development company.  How did I get here?

    This whole plan was likely hatched about 5 years ago when I, like everyone else there, got laid off by TechTV when it got purchased by Comcast and glommed into G4.  At that point I was the Lead Engineer of the Interactive Television Group.   At TechTV the ITV Group’s job was to support affiliate sales by creating apps to support cable companies new interactive and on-demand initiatives.   We were a small group and when we got let go we had plans to start an Interactive Television start-up, but time passed, we never got traction and  Interactive Television never really took off so I took a job with a company called Metatv – which was shortly bought by Comcast and Cox and turned into TVWorks (The whole Comcast thing is a bit hinky – I’m not sure I’m ever going to escape them completely).

    The move to MetaTV/TVWorks/Comcast was likely a very fortuitous event.  At TVWorks we were building the infrastructure to support the ETV/EBIF spec (which started life as a Metatv spec) for Comcast and Cox.  There I led the Client Applications group building the first two generations of ETV applications for Comcast.  Here I became and expert at this platform and a believer in its abilities, I liked my job but about a year and a half ago I wasn’t quite loving it.  As Comcast’s corporate infrastructure began to work its way into TVWorks processes I started to get a bit of an itch that I wasn’t meant to be working directly for such a huge corporate entity.  As long as I was at TVWorks I’ve been doing an evening M.B.A at SF State. The impetus for this was that since my time at TechTV I thought I would be heading more towards a managerial/entrepreneurial career path, I figured an engineer with an M.B.A is a pretty good swiss army knife of an entrepenuer.   I mean here I was in the cradle of the internet civilization and had yet to work at a true startup.   I got completely hooked meanwhile on Hacker News and the Y combinator funding model and even submitted a couple of startup plans to their funding cycles. The thing with these plans weren’t that they were impossible – but I’m not sure I was committed to them.

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