Start-up to Big Company

John Lusk — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:15:11 +0000

The The MouseDriver Chronicles finishes, the Insiders continue, and our quest to dominate the world with MouseDriver continued, right? (for those not in the know, MouseDriver is a computer mouse shaped as the head of a driver golf club….yeah, tons of intrinsic value there). Not exactly. Both Kyle and I knew that we eventually wanted to sell Platinum Concepts, Inc. and MouseDriver, but we never anticipated how long and arduous that process would actually take. Eventually, we did sell the assets of MouseDriver in mid-2003 to a small gift distributor on the East Coast. Not too sure what they’re doing with the product at this point, but every now and then I do run across a MouseDriver online. Honestly, I’m guessing that our leftover inventory is still making the online retailing rounds.

And where did Kyle and I end up? I spent most of 2003 riding the coattails of The MouseDriver Chronicles. Speaking at conferences, events, business school lectures….you name it. It was cool talking about my experiences, and in many cases, actually getting paid to do so. But my 15 minutes of fame didn’t last long and by July, 2003 I was exhausted. I knew I needed a reprieve from the emotional roller coaster that I’d been on for the last 4 years and ended up taking a job at Microsoft. The Microsoft experience was great. Learned all about leadership, building, managing and growing teams and even got to do some pretty cool marketing things. Left Microsoft in 2007 to join WhitePages, where I’ve helped the company reposition the brand and grow their customer base. Check out banthephonebook.org for a cool, and much needed, social cause campaign WhitePages recently launched.

Kyle went to Intuit where he worked on their online version of QuickBooks. In 2005 he took advantage of an opportunity to jump over to Google, where he helped launch a number of new products, including Google Checkout. When Google acquired YouTube a couple of years ago, Kyle saw an opportunity to join a team that was a bit smaller, less structured and a bit more entrepreneurial. Kyle is still at YouTube helping to grow that business, and gets to work with Chad Hurley (founder of YouTube), but I know his desire to someday start another company is still strong.

So, did we leave the entrepreneurial life for the corporate world? Yeah, we did. We both needed the reprieve and both knew that we could acquire some valuable skillsets in bigger companies that would help us succeed in our next ventures.

And what’s next? We still talk every now and then about what to start next. Who knows, maybe this blog will chronicle our thought process.

Questions, comments? Feel free to comment below.

John

The MouseDriver Story: After the Book

John Lusk — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:30:24 +0000

I had the fortunate opportuntiy to speak to a group of Harvard Business School Alumni last week in Austin. Amazingly, The MouseDriver Chronicles (the book Kyle Harrison and I wrote in 2002 chronicling our startup experiences) is still selling, still being read and still generating tons of questions about the small business experience. Who would have thought? At one point in time, the book make it into the classrooms of 150+ universities around the world, although I can’t imagine that number still holds.

In addition to the standard questions (like, ‘what in the hell were the two of you thinking when you decided to manufacture a novelty computer mouse out of your San Francisco apartment’), I’m consistently asked the same question: What happens to MouseDriver, you and Kyle after the book ends? It’s a pretty appropriate question as the book ends in December, 2000 whereas the MouseDriver story continued for another two years. Not our fault…the publisher was so anxious to get the book out and take advantage of the opportunity that we were ‘asked’ to end the book after the 2001 calendar year. So, what happened to us? Well, the MouseDriver Insider Newsletters kept going. In fact, we probably had more fodder during the second half of the story as some pretty crazy stuff started to happen…including a complete economic collapse, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one really dead-beat distributor. All of the MouseDriver Insiders are posted on the really, really old MouseDriver Chronicles site, so feel free to check them out. Start with ‘The Story Gets Better’ if you’ve already read the book (posted on 2-14-01).

We still have an option to write the 2nd half of The MouseDriver Chronicles, and coming from experience, I can tell you that Part II is much crazier and more entertaining than the original. Just a matter of find the time and the motivation to crank the second book out.

I’ll fill you in a bit more on what Kyle and I have actually been doing with our careers over the past 6 years in my next post. Lots of good stuff in there.

Questions, comments, concerns? Feel free to comment below.

John
www.twitter.com/johnlusk

PS It’s not lost upon me that this is my first MouseDriver post in over 6 years. Want to see where I’ve been posting my thoughts over the last couple of years? Check out the WhitePages Blog.

John Lusk's Blog » The MouseDriver Chronicles

Start-up to Big Company

The MouseDriver Story: After the Book