Newman’s First Law of Entrepreneurship:

Whatever you think your job is as CEO, your job is actually fundraising.

Back when I used to fight competitively, I discovered that I rarely went into the ring with more determination than my opponent. “Hey,” I’d think, “it’s just a sport.”

Then I’d get punched in the face. And all of a sudden, I’d start to get serious.

Sometimes, I’d break a tooth, or fracture a knuckle. And it was in those moments that I’d think to myself, “one of us is leaving here in an ambulance, and it isn’t going to be me.”

Vince Lombardi observed that it’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get back up. But, in my experience, the truth is a step further yet: if you get knocked down, make sure you get back up twice as determined, twice as sure of what you need to do, than you were before.

As Bruce Lee advised, “forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life.”

Speaking of next phases: it appears the last two years of re-structuring Cyan has paid off, as we’re now profitable.

[And it still definitely beats having a real job.]

For the past few years, Cyan has been working solely behind the scenes – putting together financial structures, building our infrastructure, and generally missing out on all of the fun parts of indie film in favor of more ulcer-inducing fare.

But, now, all that work is finally paying off, as we’re shifting back to actively making and releasing movies.

To kick off the shift, we’re counting down to pre-production on two new films, Keeper of the Pinstripes, and Yelling to the Sky.

In some ways, the two movies couldn’t be more different – the first a big-budget family film built around the New York Yankees, the second a small, gritty, race-complicated indie drama. But, in other ways, they’re quite similar – both coming-of-age stories, both driven by scripts strong enough to have garnered amazing casts.

We’re hoping to add three more films to our 2009 slate, all of which, ideally, we’ll be releasing in theaters throughout 2010. We have a number of strong contenteders for those three slots, but, at this point, we’re also focusing nearly all of our attention on simply surviving these first two.

As they’ll be consuming much of my life for the next couple of months, they’ll likely also be taking up a lot of this site. Stay tuned.

CrossFit NYC’s first location was on the fourth floor of a building in the Garment District. The building was old, with rickety construction, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising when, after months of our jumping around and dropping weights and generally pounding the floor, the ceiling fell down onto our downstairs neighbors.

I don’t mean the entire ceiling, and – fortunately – I don’t mean that we actually knocked a hole through our floor and fell down to the level below. Instead, it was just a piece of the ceiling, a six by ten foot chunk of plaster that had shaken loose as much due to age and poor construction as from reverberation.

Still, from our downstairs neighbors’ perspective, we had knocked down their ceiling, and they weren’t thrilled about it. And they made that pretty clear.

Despite the death threats and the law suits, when we eventually moved out it had more to do with running out of space than with them. Still, we certainly weren’t sad to leave them behind.

Because it wasn’t just the ceiling. These guys came up to yell at us several times a day, saying they could hear every step we took across our thickly rubberized floor, saying we made it impossible for them to hold meetings.

Which I always found to be slightly funny. The guys downstairs were a messenger company. And I could never quite imagine what sort of critical meetings they might be holding, in our shithole of a building, all morning and afternoon long.

CrossFit NYC’s latest location is only ten blocks down from that first home, but it’s a world apart. The space is five times as large, clean, with showers and changing rooms, in a much newer, much nicer building. And, this time, when we moved in to the third floor, the second was still unoccupied. Which meant that whoever moved in below us would have a chance to hear whatever noise we might make beforehand, would know exactly what they were getting themselves into.

And, in this economy, with New York’s commercial real estate market collapsing, we reasoned, we might go neighborless for months or years before the space was filled.

Or not. We were in our new digs for less than a month before we discovered that a company had just leased the second floor.

It turns out, they’re a messenger company. And they’ve already visited us a few times about the noise.

Let’s hope their ceilings are screwed in tight.

Spent most of Cyan’s 2008 drafting legal documents, building Monte Carlo simulations, and writing novels’ worth of white papers and other business materials. Literally thousands and thousands of pages.

All of which, in short, was necessary, but not sufficient. So, now, in 2009, it’s time to actually put all of that to work. As the old saying goes, you can’t plough a field by turning it over in your mind.

Like the proverbial frog boiled slowly to death, the parents unable to see how much their child has grown in the past year having watched that growing day-to-day, I’d similarly totally missed the fact that Cyan’s office has somehow gradually become a complete and total shit-hole.

Granted, it wasn’t great to begin with. Having outgrown our prior office, but with more hiring on the not-too-distant horizon, we needed a temporary space to hole up. Hence our current digs, which are indeed cool (in the Village, with a gated courtyard, and very high ceilings), but completely ill-suited (it was built as a loft apartment, not an office) and already a tight fit when we moved in.

Because we knew we wouldn’t be here permanently, we skimped on setting it up in the first place. And it’s gone downhill since. Our conference table chairs (West Elm) have cracked sufficiently that a giant splinter from one recently tore a hole in the ass of my suit pants. The white walls have slowly scuffed to gray. Piles of files, DVDs, trailers, and posters have sprung up like fungus. And, speaking of fungus, the entire place has started to smell a bit, in a way vaguely reminiscent of a frat house basement.

So, even though we think we’re only here for another half year, tops, I’ve now reached the point where I can’t even stand to look at this for many days more, much less weeks or months.

A painter’s swinging by tomorrow morning to give us a quote, we’re weighing options for replacement chairs and lights, and we’re considering where we might hang the Cyan movie posters we’d long been holding off on framing.

And, even after all of that, it probably still won’t be good. But, at least, it won’t be a painful embarrassment whenever anyone stops by. Which, at the moment, would be a pretty big improvement.

About a week back, I suggested that a smarter approach to a bail-out – rather than buying toxic assets from banks – would be to simply invest directly in those banks themselves.

At the time, I assumed Paulson – due to long-standing investment bank allegiances – was unwisely unlikely to take that smarter route. But, apparently, there’s nothing like a solid week of clusterfuck to put all the options back on the table.

Because, as of yesterday evening, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Pair that with a recent call from the Deputy Director of New York State’s Office for Motion Pictures and Television, who had read my entry about the film provisions of the bail-out bill and hoped I could answer some questions about them, and it appears this blog really might be, as the intro paragraph has long hyperbolically claimed, one of the best sites on the internet after all.