When I was in my mid-twenties, I aspired to a career in parks and recreation administration in Portland, OR. It doesn’t sound sexy, I know. But, I worked with some of the best people I have every met (several of who I still count as good friends) and I loved the work. What could be more gratifying than being a steward of the natural environment and helping kids expand their horizons? Let me assure you, very little. There is a Yiddish expression that says “Man plans, God laughs.” That pretty much sums up what happened to me. I reconnected with an acquaintance from college and fell in love with him about 2 weeks before he moved 3,000 miles away to go to graduate school. My skills were portable, his graduate school was not, so I picked up and moved. For reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, it made more sense for me to start a consulting business that to get a job locally. Thus Forethought was born. I have kept Forethought a viable business for the past 13 years. Under the Forethought banner, I worked with nonprofit, private and public sector organizations, facilitating complex agreements, providing program and process evaluations, strategic planning and training services. (If you read that last sentence as “blah, blah blah, blah blah” you are in good company. Even I think it sounds too wonky for my own good.)
Then came the day when I had a Wonderful, Awful Idea! Why not create a community-oriented co-working space? Thus CubeSpace was born! CubeSpace was a community hub, where people from all sectors worked alone, together. It also became the hub of Portland’s Open Tech community. It was, to borrow a phrase from the Peace Corps, the hardest job I ever loved. I have never worked as long or as hard as I did while running CubeSpace. But, it was also immensely gratifying. But, in June 2009 we had to shut our doors. We were a little too ahead of our time* (co-working spaces blossomed about a year after we opened our doors), made some critical mistakes, but most of all, were victims of the economic downturn.
What followed were the dark times. Two years of mourning everything we had poured our hearts, souls and entire savings into. Then, one day, things started to look ok again. And after a couple of years of looking for work in this lousy economy, the Tech Whisperer emerged from the ashes of my latent entrepreneurial streak. Tech Whisperer started as me just helping a couple of friends. I had learned a lot about technology from CubeSpace and most importantly, I had a great group of friends who could answer my own technical questions. Then one of my friends told her friends about me and so on, and so on and so on. Just like the Faberge Organic shampoo commercials from the 1980s.
So now, in addition to my original intention of helping people select, customize and integrate their gadgets, I am (happily) back to supporting microbusiness owners. I have had several requests to help business owners simplify their websites so they can better maintain them themselves. That is the true nature of entrepreneurship. You never know what it right around the bend. Only that life won’t be boring.
* Apropos of my comment that CubeSpace was ahead of its time, I was watching Aaron Sorkin’s commencement speech at Syracuse University and as usual, he hit the nail right on the head when he said “…remember, the first one through the wall always gets hurt.”