My pager beeped in the middle of a meeting at 1-800-FLOWERS.<\/p>\n
I knew exactly what it was. Another order on my own website.<\/p>\n
This was 2001. I was 22.
\nA DBA in their Long Island office by day,
\nbuilding a small calling-cards e-commerce site by night.<\/p>\n
The product was digital.
\nEvery order had to be emailed to the customer manually.<\/p>\n
No email-to-phone in 2001.
\nNo BlackBerry yet. Just a pager.<\/p>\n
So when the beep came in the middle of a my work,
\nI knew an order was sitting there. <\/p>\n
Finish the work day. Drive 15 minutes home.
\nLog in to my home computer. Send the order myself.<\/p>\n
Back to the day job the next morning.
\nThen another beep.<\/p>\n
It got tiring. So I built my way out.
\nFirst I automated the fulfillment.
\nThen I set up a small call center in India to handle customers,
\nso the beeps stopped pulling me out of meetings.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later, I have built five companies.
\nNone of them ever stopped paging me.<\/p>\n
The pager is gone.
\nThe phone replaced it.
\nThen the tablet.
\nThen the WhatsApp message at 2am from a customer in another time zone.<\/p>\n
People romanticize building.
\nThey picture the launch, the funding, the exit. <\/p>\n
Nobody pictures the drive home at the end of the day to ship one order by hand.<\/p>\n
If your business never pages you, you do not have a business yet. You have an idea.<\/p>\n
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\nWriting 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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