Day 15 of 100

“You need to tell him to fire the guy.”

I was sitting with my coworkers talking about our boss who has stolen yet another idea from us.

“Ok. I’ll do it.”

When the dot com bust happened, I was able to stay on at a startup through four rounds of layoffs. The last round was me laying myself off. On my last day we sat in an empty conference room and watched Office Space while eating Togo’s sandwiches.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but quickly pivoted into running a small consulting business that helped companies with IT issues. I hated it. I decided that I would apply to business school. Of course it was during a year where applications submitted were three times more than any year in history. I, of course, applied to top notch schools with a mediocre GMAT and a 2.5 GPA from school.

The number of schools I got into? Zero.

I decided to spend the summer with my biological father who I had spoken to less than ten times in my life, but we had kinda reconnected when I was 18. I figured it was a good time to get to know him.

I drove to Colorado with a Ford Explorer full of clothes and a few thousand dollars in my pocket. My father told me about some work that he had lined up for me, and I assumed I would be there for a few months and then head to business school.

No business school wanted me. All the work promised me never showed up. By the end of the summer I was out of money and started to apply for jobs in California and Colorado. On the day I packed my car ready to drive back to California, I got a job offer at a company called Video Professor in Golden, Colorado.

Yes, the same MLM scammy company that sold DVDs on how to use computer programs. The owner once called the entire marketing and business development staff into a room and yelled at us for not making him the richest man in Colorado. There was a rumor that he had a line of credit in the 10s of 1000s at a local strip club. As you can imagine, he was not a great boss.

A few months in, I was asked to get our boss fired. I went to the VP and explained all the reasons why our boss was awful. A week later, I got fired, and a month after that I ended up at ServiceMagic, which led to my first real company, Current Wisdom.

Funny how fate works.