No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11 After Pinpoint

I always knew I wouldn’t be able to sit still for long. I scoffed at people who said that I had retired at the age of 39. If I were to stay home, my wife said that the only one who would be more frustrated than me would be her. I decided that I wasn’t going to do another startup, concluding that I’d been there and done that, but I didn’t know what I was going to do. My retirement lasted eight months, during which time I wrote this book.

iContact

David and Bob decided that they were going to leave Pinpoint soon after I did. They wanted to do another startup but hadn’t settled on an idea. For a while I was deluded with the notion that I wouldn’t join them, but eventually I realized that I couldn’t resist. Once I told them I was in, we sat down for an afternoon brainstorming session at a Chili’s restaurant in Boulder. David and Bob had a list of seven ideas, each one different from the next. I don’t remember what they were, but the one we picked was the idea of using your cell phone to identify which friends were nearby so as to be able to connect with them.

This was in 2004, in the era before Facebook and iPhones, when social networking wasn’t mainstream and cell phones weren’t open for applications. Our experience was in selling enterprise software to businesses, so this was about as different as different could be. But that was the point: we wanted to prove that we had the ability to do something different. Plus, we wanted to create something that ...