Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 78Follow Your Heart

Mark Solon

Mark is a partner at Techstars. Previously, he cofounded and was managing partner of Highway 12 Ventures and has been investing in and working with startups since 1995. He’s been a Techstars mentor since 2007.

I met my wife Pam in a coffee shop in Boston’s South End in 1993. Having lived in big cities my whole life (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston), I was smitten with this gal, who grew up in the small town of Boise, Idaho, and had a zest for life like few I’ve ever met. I asked her to marry me as soon as I had saved enough money for a ring. Over the next seven years, we moved from our tiny apartment in the South End to Bunker Hill and then up to Marblehead, where we bought a creaky 150-year-old Victorian near the ocean that needed a ton of work. She was working at a cool startup in the city and I became a partner at a boutique private equity firm. We had a daughter in late 1998 and had another child on the way in early 2000.

Life seemed like a fairy tale. There was only one problem: I’d lie awake at night and dream about living in Idaho. I wanted to ditch life in the big city with all its trappings for a simpler life in the mountains of Idaho. Yet there we were, parents of a one-year-old and eight months pregnant with our second child. I knew that if I didn’t pull the trigger soon, it would never happen.

I finally got the nerve, woke Pam on her birthday, and said, “Happy birthday, let’s move to Boise.” She looked at me like ...