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I was involved in a very small startup. There were three of us, and we didn't release anything. What happened was that my cofounders decided that they would have rather had someone else on the team than me because I didn't code (at the time) and can be occasionally difficult to work with. Several months later both of them, after failing to find another third person for the venture, called it quits. So the whole thing, which was based on my idea from the start, failed. This was in mid-January. The way it happened, however, gave me a great deal of what I would call "negative inspiration." When I first got the news that I was off the team, I spent a weekend away to relax and collect my thoughts. When I got back, I went to the library and checked out books on programming, called and emailed several contacts who I had talked about working with before, and got to work. I learned PHP and started writing a Facebook app, talked with the CEO of a video game art outsourcing company about working on a spinoff project, and talked with some young founders I had met along the way about joining their teams. It's a great way to harness energy (though I wouldn't recommend the way it happened to anyone): I ended up in a state of "Oh yeah? I can't program? We'll see about that!" and had a working prototype of a Facebook app coded from scratch within two weekends (no fancy frameworks, which I now know is a stupid idea but I wanted to do it more to learn the language). I worked my ass off on the other fronts for several weeks, spinning plates left and right, while taking extra work at my freelance/contract 'day job' running A/V at meetings in the corporate penthouse of a very large company. There was a bit of panic because I had expected some compensation for my first startup which never arrived, so I had to borrow a bit of money - about a month of living expenses. About a month later, I started at my current job, which I love. I've learned new skills on the job as well as sharpening old ones - as employee number 2 at a startup, I can pick up tasks that interest me. I'm now coding in Actionscript 3, RoR, and occasionally Java (with a few tiny bits of PHP and Javascript here and there). So it all worked out in the end. Though I'm disappointed that my original idea and company didn't work out, I realize that it wouldn't have worked out between the other members of the team and me anyway, even if I knew how to code and wasn't occasionally a jerk about things. In that respect, I'm glad I was out when I was and not later, because I would have been wasting my time. (edited for grammar. COMMAS!) |