Mystery Revealed

I can now explain why I stopped blogging for a month.

I’m going to leave my position at Penn at the end of the year. It’s the best place I’ve ever worked, so it’s not because of job dissatisfaction. Part of me thinks I must be crazy to leave. The reason is that Maria and I have come up with several business ideas we want to pursue. We’ve been making slow progress on them since we got back from Japan, but if any of them are going to have a chance of really getting off the ground, I need to dive in whole-heartedly. (I should point out Maria is not leaving her job no matter what happens - she loves what she’s doing and where she’s doing it.)

We came back from Japan with two ideas, and figured we’d try to pick one to focus on. Instead, we ended up adding two more. Unfortunately I still can’t go into much detail about a lot of it, but here’s what I can say publicly:

• One is a software application that I’ve developed (it’s currently in prototype form), and I think there may be a market for it. I’m working with a friend of mine in California to see if we can generate some interest from the venture capital community there.
• Another is an ecommerce site, selling really cool hand-made candies from a certain foreign country (take your best guess which one) that no one is currently selling online in the US.
• A consulting business, along the lines of the Eurasia Group, but with a somewhat different focus. This has a lot of different aspects to it, and primarily involves Maria and several of her colleagues. But an aspect that interests me is E-government. It’s exciting because it fuses the two fields where I have professional experience and training: political science and internet technology. First, however, I have about 10 years worth of e-government literature to catch up on…
• Web consulting: I’ve heard several horror stories over the years from friends and acquaintances who’ve paid ridiculous amounts of money for really lousy web sites. I figure if there’s room in the market to sustain people who do a bad job, there’s room for people who do a good job too. I’ve found someone to work with here in the Philadelphia area who specializes in the marketing and design side of the web business, which isn’t my strong suit. I’m interested in this partly because I think I have a good shot at being successful with it, and partly because I’m hoping it’ll serve as a sort of glue that can hold things together for me financially as we see how the other ventures go. The idea is that I can ramp up or ramp down on it as the other projects warrant (of course, that’s assuming I can find work when I need it). Penn is planning to hire me back on a part-time basis as soon as I leave my regular position, and I have a couple other small projects lined up, so I’m off to a good start.

I should know by the end of the year whether there’s any investment interest in my software. And the candy project is well underway, but we’re expecting it to take another 3 or 4 months before we’re ready to go live with it. So… stay tuned