Chapter Thirty: Founding and Running Your Own Firm

Overview

The hazards of founding your own firm include serious financial risk and grueling, anxious hours at the office. But there s great reward in seeing a company you ve created take hold, and then thrive. For entrepreneurs with the right idea and the courage and energy to bring it to fruition, becoming the successful founder of a company is a very possible dream.

Gene Bonett, the exuberant entrepreneur whose programming philosophy ” you ve got to know the territory ”leads off this book, founded his own firm when he was forty-five. Like many programmers who leave the security of an IT staff job to become entrepreneurs, he was taking quite a flyer. He had family responsibilities (a wife and two daughters), his move meant a $40,000 pay cut, and he had no nest egg to live on.

Fortunately, Gene had no idea what pitfalls lie in the path of the entrepreneur. And his risk-taking turned out well ”as risk-taking sometimes does. His advice to new entrepreneurs? Don t do it his way.