My pager beeped in the middle of a meeting at 1-800-FLOWERS.

I knew exactly what it was. Another order on my own website.

This was 2001. I was 22.
A DBA in their Long Island office by day,
building a small calling-cards e-commerce site by night.

The product was digital.
Every order had to be emailed to the customer manually.

No email-to-phone in 2001.
No BlackBerry yet. Just a pager.

So when the beep came in the middle of a my work,
I knew an order was sitting there.

Finish the work day. Drive 15 minutes home.
Log in to my home computer. Send the order myself.

Back to the day job the next morning.
Then another beep.

It got tiring. So I built my way out.
First I automated the fulfillment.
Then I set up a small call center in India to handle customers,
so the beeps stopped pulling me out of meetings.

Twenty-five years later, I have built five companies.
None of them ever stopped paging me.

The pager is gone.
The phone replaced it.
Then the tablet.
Then the WhatsApp message at 2am from a customer in another time zone.

People romanticize building.
They picture the launch, the funding, the exit.

Nobody pictures the drive home at the end of the day to ship one order by hand.

If your business never pages you, you do not have a business yet. You have an idea.

𝗞𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗻𝗮 𝗟𝗮𝗸𝗮𝗺𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗶 | 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿 · 𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗼 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 · 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿
Writing at the intersection of AI, capital, and the future of the human job market - sharing my life lessons, reflections, and honest takes from the founder-investor's seat.