Publisher's Synopsis
I wrote this book to tell my story and to encourage entrepreneurs in pursuing their dreams. Part of its contents centers on the story of how I started, grew and eventually sold my high-tech business in Silicon Valley. I interrupt the narrative in several places to pause and discuss relevant topics for entrepreneurs such as obtaining funding, hiring salespeople, or working on making a satisfying exit happen.At the time this book is being published, the Silicon Valley spirit centers on extreme competition and the view that failure is the only alternative to world domination. Not only is this a fallacy, but such thinking is a sure recipe for unhappiness and waste of good ideas as well as potentially good businesses, and surely the present book holds the complete opposite view. It is quite achievable to create a successful high-tech business of a reasonable size that will attract valuable suitors, and possibly will be highly profitable on its own as well. My success does not have the scale or the scope achieved by the big Silicon Valley moguls, and so be it. It allows me however to not worry about the next paycheck any time now or in the future.I came to Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and a cultural transplant, someone trained in computer science and programming, but not in business. So I learned by experience the things that every high-tech entrepreneur should know if he or she has a good, original idea, and would like to profit from bringing it to the marketplace. My idea was new at the time. When I started out, you could not get real-time traffic mapping on television-something we now take for granted. It's a precise and visually satisfying tool that gives the ability to escape an unwanted traffic glitch, caused by anything from a storm to a road spill. Traffic mapping devices in our vehicles and traffic news reports on television use this technology to show colorful traffic pictures that alter instantly before our eyes. Three-dimensional (3D) graphics in real-time rely on a great deal of numerical data-which is and was my area of expertise. I believed I could provide the technology to improve traffic reporting, and I did. My success did not follow the typical path of new tech business ventures, which makes me a Silicon Valley nonconformist, of sorts-partially by intent, and partly by accident. I did some pretty interesting things that worked well for me, and a few things that did not. This book is my attempt to help other high tech entrepreneurs avoid the common pitfalls and traps that can get in the way of being a success in Silicon Valley. Because it really is possible to be a success, without necessarily creating the next Facebook.
