... of the rest of my life.

 

Today I had the hardest conversation that I can remember--I told my brother that I was leaving his company after thirteen years to work full-time on my own company.

 

I started working with my brother right out of college. In fact, I never even finished college--I came home in the middle of Fall quarter of my senior year withdrawing from all my classes because I had gotten sick early in the quarter and stayed in my apartment for 2 or 3 weeks.

 

So I was staying at home with my parents and around February my mother said something like “You should get a job, I hear your brother needs someone to help him--testing the program he is working on.” Taking the “hint” I talked to him and got a job working at the NeXT offices in Kirkland, WA testing a talent management program for the William Morris Agency for ten bucks an hour.

 

My brother and two of his friends from college were working on the program and later, once NeXT was able to finish up their responsibility in the project, my brother and his friends formed a company to finish up the software and named it after a game they kept wanting to write: The game was going to be called “Omni” so they called the company “The Omni Group”. Unfortunately, there was another “The Omni Group” in Washington so they ended up with the official name of Omni Development, Inc. and since the other company was already listed in the phone book, they had to make do with “Omni Group, The” in the listings.

 

I had been really gung-ho about forming the company. I bought a book at Costco called “Starting a Business in Washington State” which we had all looked at for information about the mechanics of the incorporating, the advantages and disadvantages of C-corps, S-corps, LLCs, etc. I even found an accountant and a lawyer to consult with on the details of starting the company and it wasn’t until we got to the lawyer’s and I was asked to stay out of the meeting that I found out that I wasn’t going to be a founder of the company.

 

That was probably the first time I contemplated leaving--but it wasn’t the last. I think over the course of the next 13 years I had serious thoughts of leaving around five times, but the only time that I actually discussed it was about 5 years later.

 

It was at the beginning of the dot-com hype and we had a consulting client named CyberSlice that allowed you to order pizza online. They were expanding to allow all kinds of order-out food and changing their name to CyberMeals (and later became food.com and I don’t know what happened from there). This was probably the consulting job that I did my personal best job of both managing and programming--I estimated rewriting the entire website, adding a bunch of new features, and everything. It was a 4-person, 6-month job and I was within 2 weeks of the original estimate. Well they wanted my help to find a person to be the  Director of Application Development. I reviewed resumes and tried to find a candidate while working on the rewrite and in the process they decided that I would be the ideal candidate for the job.

 

They offered me an incredible amount of money, especially since I didn’t actually make all that much working for Omni, as well as title and position. I turned them down at first, but eventually when they offered 3 times my salary I really thought I would take it. Well, I called up my brother--I actually thought he would be happy for me, but instead he came over to talk me out of it. He pointed out that the salary they were offering was actually a third of what they were paying Omni for me as a consultant and that without my help, Omni would have a really hard time making it--and the big payoff was going to be just around the corner when we really started “something” (I forget now exactly what was to create the payoff). He was practically crying at this point.

 

Well I went back the next day and turned down the offers--they even tried upping the offers--but I couldn’t make my brother cry.

 

I don’t know if I made him cry today--but I did...