Slideshare.net is one of my very favorite sites. If you haven’t been blown there by the tides of the random web before you are missing out. SlideShare is the YouTube of PowerPoints.
If you have worked in the 9 to 5 corporate world at all, you might have a distaste for PowerPoints. As much as any single workplace item, they are the stamp of the mid-level technocrat.
Often they are a personification of marketing over substance, gleaning over grokking, bullet points over in depth knowledge.
What’s the next ten words? These bullet points are the tip of the sword: just enough knowledge to get you into trouble. (thank you Jed Bartlet).
Sorry, evidently I needed to vent a bit. If you can get past all that, SlideShare is a great collection of knowledge. A couple of SlideShares I found tonight struck a cord with me. One is a summary of “what we have done right” from a small company I really admire: Dropbox.
Dropbox is a great model for aspiring entrepreneurs: really smart people doing something really hard and making it seem easy.
[slideshare id=3836587&doc=dropbox-startuplessonslearned-100423230315-phpapp02]
Next to this SlideShare was one from Pownce. Two-ish years ago Pownce was the apple of the start-up world’s eye. Founded by notable folks and staffed by with-it techies it seemed bound for IPO. Somewhere it fell off the tracks. Never would have guessed at the time of this similar looking presentation.
[slideshare id=128491&doc=pownce-lessons-learned4283]
My future is uncertain right now and I am coming up on the end of the contract I am currently working on. I have been thinking a lot lately about where my train tracks lead from here. While my company might re-win the right to do the work I am doing now, I’m not sure what I pursue if that falls through.
I spent around nine years of my life running bars. After year four or five of those years the novelty wore off. My best friends were there, it was great cash for a guy my age, but I wasn’t quite sure where it was going. What I did know was that I was getting a chance to be responsible for a volume of business that no one my age could be reasonably expected to take on.
It was a challenge. It was a rush. I have found out since I started in the corporate world that it was also the best experience that I have ever had: I learned more about responsibility and customer service in those years than any internship could have taught.
I kept grinding the last years out on the thought that it was my path to equity. With equity a person can pick their future, without it one works 9 to 5. Somewhere I drifted off those tacks.
I think its time to get it back on them.
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