Finding Investors

As I've mentioned, I own my own business.
I recently landed a really nice government contract.
But I underestimated the funds needed to kick it off. I undershot the pricing and costs of recruiting, salary, hardware and licensing. I had anticipated being able to overlap a couple of over clients with this one, but that didn't work out.

A friend of mine is a board member of a venture capitalist firm. So I've been convinced to seek out some investment funding, which is equity rather than a business loan, which is debt. Using some of her templates for determining investment needs and matching them to what I expect to use to kick off the project, it looks like I'll need to get an infusion of 750k USD. Suck!

That's almost a million dollars, even after I opted to go to open source suites of software. Yuck, I hate this part of running a business.

At any rate, it's a fun time in life. I went with some friends to Las Vegas to celebrate landing the account. And as usual, I spend crap loads of money when I drink. So I think my new rule in life is, leave the money at home if I'm drinking. Just bring enough to drink and get a town car if I get too drunk to drive.

If anyone has leads on friendly investment groups, groups that love high tech and are keen on mathematics....lemme know. :)

Growing Up Poor

So my dad was in the US Navy and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. Until I turned 8, then they got divorced and my mom won custody. She had no means to support us, she was working on her GED right around the time they got divorced.

After some drifting she settled on being a nurses aid, totally admirable career. But not very lucrative. I remember even in high school I had one pair of pants and 2-3 shirts. My mom and I did laundry in the kitchen sink and hung the clothes out the dry.

I used to look at my middle-class friends and wish I had what they had. When I was a a junior in high school I made a promise to myself; whatever it took I would do to never have to worry about money, ever. Part of that promise was to buy an insanely nice house.

Well, little did I know that even when you make quite a bit of money, you still have money problems. But last year I started building a house I designed. And it's just about done. Some fixtures need putting up and some small details need to be taken care of but here it is. Certainly it's not insanely nice, MTV will never show up to film it. But it's nice and it's mine.