There was a brief stint, after graduating college and transitioning the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund from active investing to working with existing portfolio companies, that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. In its support stage, the venture fund wasn’t really a full time job, and the market wasn’t right to raise a second fund. I knew I wanted to start another company or two, but I was entirely unsure of what, exactly, those companies were going to be.

I related as much to Mark Gerson, a long-time friend, one night over dinner. Mark had founded and was running the hugely successful Gerson Lehrman Group, a boutique investment advisory firm that works with some of the nation’s best hedge funds and mutual funds. As I had helped Mark out in the earlier days of his company – lining up some of their first clients and early employees – he offered to return the favor, by bringing me in as the firm’s Senior Technology Analyst.

In some ways, the job was perfect – I was overpaid, underworked, with about as much power and autonomy as I could hope for in a company that I didn’t run.

And I was miserable.

I always knew, at some level, that I was a pioneer, not a settler; that I had to mark out new territory, make new things, rather than just expand existing things ever onward and upward. But I didn’t realize how much taking a ‘real’ job would chip away at me. The psychological stress of being an employee, not an employer, weighed on me constantly, manifesting itself in remarkably strange ways.

Unlike in my current job, where I rarely spend more than a half hour seated at my desk – wandering off instead to internal meetings or external business lunches and dinners – at Gerson Lehrman, I spent most of my day sitting in front of a computer monitor, banging out reports, fielding calls, and generally being (or at least feigning being) productive. And, as a result, I drank lots and lots and lots of water.

Perhaps it was sheer boredom, the lack of anything better to do. But each morning, I’d open up a Crystal Geyser bottle, start sipping away, and soon find I was refilling it from the water cooler throughout the day at nearly half-hour intervals.

As a result, my primary cause for leaving the desk was heading off to the bathroom. And in those bathroom trips, something strange started to happen. Despite definitely having to go, my bladder was suddenly shy. At first, I couldn’t start peeing when someone was at the adjacent urinal. Then I couldn’t pee if there was anyone within the entire bathroom. Eventually, that parauresis slipped over into my non-work life as well – even in bar and restaurant bathrooms, I couldn’t pee when someone else was around.

As strange as it may sound, I didn’t think much of it at the time. The problem snuck up on me gradually, and like the proverbial frog in the slowly heated pot of water, I didn’t notice it had happened until I was already in deep.

Then, after a little less than a year, I had a series of small epiphanies. I knew I wanted to make movies. I knew I wanted to publish books and release CDs. I knew I wanted to keep working in entrepreneurship and technology, though in ways that helped the world. The Paradigm Blue companies were born. And I couldn’t wait to get them started.

I was worried about telling Mark that I’d be jumping ship, worried that he’d somehow be insulted by my suddenly moving on. To my pleasant surprise, however, his reaction was exactly opposite; he was enthusiastic, supportive, offering to help in a slew of ways as I set about getting the first company, Cyan Pictures, off the ground. And while I offered to stick around for another few months if they still needed assistance, he graciously said he’d be happy to let me head off at the end of the week, as he knew I’d be eager to get down to business.

I remember walking out of his office, stopping briefly at my desk, and then realizing I had to use the bathroom. And I remember, vividly, walking into the crowded bathroom, walking up to an empty urinal, and peeing away with reckless abandon.

The shy bladder was gone, and it hasn’t, not even once, come back since.