Taking Crazy Back: An Excerpt
Will be available for purchase in summer 2010.
From Chapter 3: “The End Came in the Frozen Goods Aisle”
Three months later, after quite literally 20-hour workdays, at about 10 in the morning with our seed funder there, we threw the switch on the prototype engine and held our breath.
The thing worked. In fact, it worked better than our wildest imagination. In three keystrokes and five seconds we could show you a mood chart, like a stock chart, but showing the mood of public opinion in real-time on any publicly traded company. I know you hear this from the media all the time, but I promise you there wasn’t anything like it in the world.
We launched the company’s real name, MindfulEye, and started using the positioning statement The world talks. We listen.
We were open for business.
That morning, my world made a sudden and sharp turn.
Within a couple of short weeks, we were being courted by some the most influential venture capitalists in the game.
I was 29 at this point, and at one these meetings I noticed that my breath was a little short. I wrote it off as just being excited (everyone who lives in damp Vancouver has a bit of mild asthma) so no big deal.
We signed the contract and a few days later, less than a year after I’d even thought of the idea on a napkin, my company’s bank account had three million dollars in it. We hired away from a university and moved to Vancouver a PhD level Computational Linguist.
We moved into a huge and largely empty office, grew to 10 people, then 14.
Within a month I was appointed CEO by the new board and was living the life that perhaps many students studying business today dream of: A corner office overlooking Vancouver harbour in the city’s prestigious Marine Building.
We were getting written up in major publications, starting to get clients like the Toronto Stock Exchange, and four months later we went public. At one point, on paper, my three partners and I were each worth a little under 10 million dollars.
That was busy enough. I was juggling a lot of balls just doing that, but I had other things going on too. Besides running a busy publicly traded company, the public broadcaster in Canada, CBC, had tapped me to produce and host a national live radio show about technology. At the same time I was volunteering with two charities, and had just started dating the woman who would later become my wife.
Something had to give.
There comes a point where the human body finally succumbs to stress. You are not the Energizer Bunny. You can’t keep going and going and expect your body to cooperate. Eventually, you will crash.
When crash came, I was in aisle 3B of the Safeway on Davie Street. The frozen goods aisle…
