Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s graduation season, and I had the great opportunity to be asked to write an advice letter to a soon to be graduate. Here is the letter in full, added here in hopes that some snippet might make a difference to someone:

It’s been nearly 15 years since I was in your shoes, or in your eyes, nearly a lifetime. No matter how many times someone told me, “time flies”, “life is short”, or some other sage fortune cookie wisdom, it went in one ear and out the other. I’m not so naïve to think you’re different than I was. So I’ll go a different route. If you only remember one thing from this letter, remember this: don’t live your life for anyone else. Don’t waste your limited time on earth following someone else’s dreams.

People like to talk about savings and retirement, especially to young people in your spot. That’s all well and good, but you’ll regret sacrificing your youth much more than not having your 401K where it needs to be.

Choose great work you love, and you won’t be tempted to surrender the best years of your life just to get away from it. Live in the moment, and don’t worry about finding yourself. Create yourself.

Everyone gets breaks, and you’re no different. You don’t know when they’ll come; all you can do is be prepared for them when they show up. And when your opportunities do show up, squeeze them until they scream, and even then, don’t let go until you’ve wrung everything you can out of them.

Most of your life’s book is yet to be written, and only two things limit your future: your imagination and your willingness to make bold moves. Trust in your gut and in God. Don’t take anything too seriously. Be flexible with your path, and always be learning.

Now is the time to take risks and make memories. Love who you are, and enjoy the ride,

Greg Starling

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. – Mark Twain

There are a lot of people out there giving advice on how you can start your business. I’m not smart enough to be giving advice though so I’ll just tell you how I went about starting a startup.

The short version is Fun Panda was founded because I couldn’t find a customizable bamboo case for my iPad. The longer version is:

The Idea
Coming up with an idea is easy; implementing an idea is difficult. In fact, frustrated with my inability to get any ideas to take off, I started a company called MilliSeed with a tag line of “A million ideas; a thousand beginnings.” Will Fun Panda be different? To be honest, I don’t know, but I have learned a lot from a half a dozen failed businesses over a dozen years.

A big difference this time is it’s not just an idea. This is a frustration turned business plan. I’ve sat around with groups of brilliant people throwing concepts up on the wall. In those cases, we were trying to find a niche or create a market. In this case, the market already exists. There are large market segments for customized iPad cases and environmentally responsible product. There just wasn’t an existing solution for customizable responsible iPad cases.

The Market
The reason most of my earlier businesses failed is people didn’t want what I was selling. Sure, there was money to be made, and others with similar businesses were able to succeed where I didn’t. Maybe the ideas were too soon (search engine optimization in the late 90s, green lawn care in the mid 2000s). Maybe they were too late (baseball card inventory management long after most people stopped collecting). There are plenty of excuses, but the bottom line is that if more people were buying what I was selling those businesses would have been successful.

This time around, I have a much firmer grasp of the market and the opportunity. My living room is littered with print outs of projections, trends, and market analysis.

The Team
I learned my lesson several years ago when I partnered with a couple of guys to create grassroots organization software for political movements. I didn’t know these guys particularly well, and two months later, one of them was 1,000 miles away, not answering his phone, and holding all the vital info to run the business.

This time around, I wanted to work with friends. I interview a lot of people in my “real” job, and I’ve learned being friends with someone, even for a short period of time, will tell you more about a person than you will ever learn in an interview.

My checklist for partnering:

• A Friend
• Smart
• Gets Stuff Done
• Could stand to hang around for hours on end

There is always the possibility of going it alone, but for me, I’ve done that. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders, and when things don’t go according to plan, there’s no one there to hold you accountable, pick you up, or not allow you to quit. This time around, going it alone wasn’t an option.

The Money
Everyone I told about the customizable bamboo cases loved the idea, and when they saw the samples, the responses were amplified. This made for an odd problem – too many people wanted to invest. I followed the partner checklist above and found a couple of people who could help off-set some of the start-up costs.

This will become a new rule of thumb for me for future business ideas. If people aren’t fighting each other to invest in your business, it’s probably not a very good idea.

The Future
While I’ve made a couple of personal loans to the business, I also know where my bread is buttered. I have a great job that I love very much. I’m not going to go into debt to grow Fun Panda, but I’m also not going to be taking money out of the company. For now, invest and reinvest in the company, work hard at night and on the weekends, and see if we can’t grow this thing into something great.

In the end, no one knows exactly why anything works. Groupon was an accident.  HP turned down the personal computer idea 5 times before Steve Wozniak partnered with Steve Jobs to found Apple. For now, it’s a really fun project with a lot of potential.

If you’re looking for an iPhone or iPad case, check us out.

For every problem there is an opportunity. – Anonymous

The website is back up and running with some nice behind the scenes upgrades. I will miss the irony that the last post was about being lazy, but I’m looking forward to adding several new articles over the next couple of weeks.

The only downside – and it is a huge downside – is that all of the user comments to the articles and posts have been lost.

I’ve always felt the success of my website is directly related to the comments and discussions that took place after the initial post. Fortunately, the feedback and constructive (and sometimes not so constructive) criticisms have been incorporated into the enhanced site.

Unfortunately, the great debates that would really allow a new reader to see where some of the discussions ended up are simply gone.

I hope the conversation can be picked up where we left off, and new readers jump in where we all left off.

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for. – Alexander Smith

Sure I would like to be famous. Who wouldn’t want to get an invite to speak at TED on managing millennials or modern project management. Walking around the conference where everyone knows your name and wants to buy your drink – that’s the pinnacle of career success. At least it seemed like a good goal to put up on my Oprah® approved Secret* vision board.

So I dug in and read all the big blogs and books on personal branding. I was even tricked into reading Dan Schawbel’s rambling, self-serving, never get those three hours of my life back, take on the subject*. (Book Review Here)

About half way through my research, I was prepared to spend countless hours adding to my twitter followers and blogging every day. All I had to do, according to pretty much every expert in the field, was to start telling a lot of people I’m famous. It was self-help 101, you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s right; that’s the secret: you tell enough people that you’re famous and you become famous.

As it turns out, it’s also quite a bit of work: find, follow, tweet – find, follow, tweet – find, follow, tweet. Comment on popular blogs and link back to your site (even if you don’t care about the content). Get out and be seen at the conferences and shows. That’s just too much work doing nothing.

I’m too lazy to be famous. I guess I’ll just have to stick to trying to be better at my actual job.

*These are hyperlinked ironically. You shouldn’t actually buy these books. They’re horrible.

So here I go, another member of the unwashed masses throwing his hat in the blogger arena. I know there are tens of thousands of blogs and bloggers already out there on the web, but I’ve yet to find a blog that is really geared to people like me. I don’t work for a Silicon Valley giant or an independent software vendor, and I’m not a consultant. I’m like most of you. I work for a mid-sized privately held company that on its best days will win a fight or two against the big boys.

We have an average sized development team of about 15 programmers, and I wouldn’t trade for any of them. They are all ridiculously smart, embrace constant change, and are always learning something new. In order to compete with the giants on Wall Street, we’ve had to get nimble by going agile. We’ve had to throw a lot of the traditional development methods out and cut our own path through the jungle. This blog will be an insight into the journey we’re taking. We’ve taken a lot of what we saw working in other shops and combined some of the best methods to form an agile environment that works for us. So we won’t call it XP, lean, or scrum. We’ve taken what we feel are the best of those worlds and apply them daily.

For the mea culpa: right now, I know what I know, and everything I write is the most intelligent way I know of doing something. If I knew of a better way to do something, I would be doing it that way. Seems kind of like a no brainer, but I thought it had to be said. Hopefully, two or three years from now, I’ll look back on some of these posts and think, ‘wow, I had no idea what I was doing.’ That’s the process of learning and growing that I love so much. I hope you enjoy the ride as well.