Shane Pearlman

The blogosphere is attracting some great people. In September, I shared the entrepreneur blogs I read. The stuff put together by teams, with editors and money (with a few exceptions). I love those blogs because they represent a phenomenal resource for all of us who are learning how to run a business.

I have a second stash, my little private stash. The people out there writing about life, work, and business, who I personally like. Those sole individual bloggers, just telling us what they think, whether or not we care. Here’s a shout out to all of you who write because it stokes you out.
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If you don’t keep score, how do you know when you are winning? Now there is your list of dreams, an indispensables road map to happiness. Some of us though, happen to like big neat targets we can obsess over. Like ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Peter: Ahem…well, don’t you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn’t exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year!

Shane: Really?

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Shane: That’s a number. Okay then. We hold the world ransom for…..One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!

I was reading the web when I saw a post by Cristian Dorobantescu from energybyte.com which asked these questions:
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es·sen·su·al [uh-sen-shoo-uhl]
adjective

1. That which at its core is both critical to our survival and arousing or exciting to our base instincts: the senses and the appetites.
2. Being such by its very nature or in the highest meaning; the ultimate experience which elicits raw emotion.
3. That which every artisan seeks, sometimes called the ‘holy grail’ or ‘the best work I ever did that will never win an award because it’s way too personal and a little too weird’.
4. A type of project management lacking in restraints; raw and obsessively driven to identify and focus upon the core of each element. Often resulting in ’simple software’.

   Synonym: iPhone

You know why you need a mentor. You took the time and energy to find one. If you haven’t yet: take your list of dreams, goals and aspirations for your personal life, find someone who has achieved the bulk of them in your industry (or if there are none, consider changing industry) and grab their coat tails and never let go. A bit of elbow grease and a whole lot of patience and interviewing will do the trick. So, now that you have a mentor, what the heck do you do?
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Four years ago, Julie & I decided we were (emotionally) ready to buy our first house. Santa Cruz is quite expensive, with the median house price weighing in at $740,000 and the medium apartment around $480,000. This was going to have a significant impact on our monthly cashflow. We had some savings, and a loving wedding gift from both our families gave us enough to put 20% on a small apartment or townhouse.

Julie and I sat down to figure out what mortgage payment we really thought we could afford. I was trying to stabilize my business at the time, as it was often feast or famine. Some months I could pull in $15,000, other months I would see $1,500. This discussion ran for weeks and continued into our family vacation.

Enter the parents. My father listened quietly as Julie and I ran through past numbers and possibilities for hours on end. One evening at dinner he asked me: “How much do you think you will make in the next six months?” A long pause ensued. The fleas began to leap for saftey as my craneum began to heat. I guess he couldn’t take the pathetic, confounded look on my face. “How much do you have in your sales pipeline?” he tried. I really didn’t know. Most of my gigs are word of mouth. Even the bids I was writing, or discussing with potential clients, could go on for months and fizzle. How was I supposed to know? After I suggested getting my tarot cards, dad laughed, put on his Australian leather cowboy mentor’s hat and asked me to pull out my trusty business notebook.
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We are stoked to add a new W3 award to the 2007 list of achievements. I’d say more, but we just register for these kinds of awards for the party and the networking. Ok fine, maybe we are just a little excited. The 2007 Webby Awards party in June was kick ass, check out the pictures.

The W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning sites, marketing programs, and video work created for the Internet. The W³ is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts.

ac·tion·ate [ak-shuhn-nit]
adjective

1. A passion to act, driven by strong emotion, that is often considered by your more cerebral and dis-actionate kin to be extremely foolhardy.
2. A characteristic assigned to saints, sinners, some bloggers and most entrepreneurs.

Usage: “Though many people express the desire when going through the blog action day sign-up list, most were not quite as actionate as they might have proclaimed.”

In honor and respect of those who boned it up and wrote some great articles. A few of our favorites:
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We are proud to announce that we have been crunched. Sort of. Our client Blip.tv has earned themselves the attention of the public eye. The flash video player on which we worked has received solid public recognition. And being the choice for the TechCrunch40 is pretty cool. Even their one and only complaint has already been developed and is in testing for deployment.
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I wake with anywhere between thirty-five to a hundred and fifty legitimate emails in my in-box. A voice-mail or two. A honey-do list (I love you babe). And my IM flashes the minute I log on. The day begins anew with the urgent constantly pulling my attention. So how do you make sure that the important is not overwhelmed by the urgent? The answer lies in an old Jewish custom.

According to Jewish law, each day begins as the sun sets below the horizon. Think about it. What makes more sense: for a new day to begin when the old day ends or at some random time in the middle of the night after you passed out? The implications are many.
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You need to tell any woman who you interview like me the following: This is not going to be like any interview you have ever gone to. We are not a large corporation … we are two guys running a small company and we really do care about your dreams and what you want out of your life.-J

We are not running a reality show. This is our life, and for all of you who understand how emotional and difficult interviewing can be, it should be private. That why I let this article sit in the fringe for a month before posting it.

I had no intention whatsoever of blogging about the interviews themselves. Until tonight. J asked me to tell the next people we interview the quote above. I asked her if I could write it on our site and she agreed.
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