Vyrotek|Bridging the gap between code and wealth

Yesterday, The founder of Xmission Pete Ashdown paid a visit to Neumont and I had the opportunity to listen to him speak. Pete shared various experiences on how he developed the idea for his ISP company and also how much work it took. I wish I took notes! He used some interesting terms that I heard for the first time. The one that stuck out was Sweat Equity. He used this term when he was talking about all the traveling and work he had to do just to run his first server. I suppose when you think about sweat equity it makes sense. There are businesses interested in paying you for something they didn’t want to do themselves for various reasons. Some reasons might be because the initial risk or startup costs are very high. Services that require the kind of work Pete put into his company are what makes his service different than something such as a new website idea. Anyone can copy someone’s great site idea (MySpace, Facebook, etc), but it takes a lot more work to start a company with tangible assets and services. This of course got me thinking more about what I really want to accomplish in the future. I think if I had a choice between developing some great site and actually starting a company with employees I would go with the later. It would be great to start something with employees and provide a valuable service and have something that I could invest some sweat equity into. It’s going to take a lot of work no matter what I choose to do.