Avast

Ahoy! It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Shiver me timbers!

And what better time be than this to recall the greatest pirate of all time, and the patron saint of all entrepreneurs, Blackbeard.

Ay, Blackbeard. And if ye don’t believe he was true an entrepeneur, observe the only records recovered from the Adventure, his fine yet sunken craft:

Such a day, rum all out- Our company somewhat sober- A damned confusion amongst us !- Rogues a-plotting – Great talk of separation- so I looked sharp for a prize- Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot, then things went well again.

Arrr, that be running a startup indeed! Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me…

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September 19, 2008

More Waiting

In the perennial Cyan fundraise, once again stuck in a patch of waiting for high-net-worth investors to move their money.

As my VP of Development commented today, they may be liquid, but they seem to be very high viscosity.

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July 17, 2008

Down to Business

When I first met Jess, she was serving as the head of marketing and de facto COO of Liz Lange Maternity, a high end fashion brand. She had been there for nearly seven years, from when the company was still pretty much brand new, by the time it was acquired last November by a large private equity fund.

So, she took that company transition as a chance to step out herself, and start looking for other opportunities.

Pretty quickly, it became clear she was talking to basically two categories of companies: large ones, where they were eager to hire her, but where she was less eager to actually work; and small ones (with annual sales under, say, $5m), who were also eager to hire her, and with whom Jess was excited to work, except for their inability to actually pay a salary.

From the beginning, I suggested that she consider launching a consulting firm, the idea being that there were a lot of those little, sub-$5m companies that had bootstrapped their way to success, but had started topping out, and desperately needed strategic, marketing, financial and operational assistance.

Jess, however, was against the idea, mainly on the grounds that she was convinced she’d never find any companies willing to actually hire her as a consultant.

But, it turns out, she didn’t need to, because companies started finding her.

By now, JG & Co. (at the moment, the ‘& Co.’ being me) has signed on a slew of clients, including great brands like [Lucy Sykes](http://www.lucysykesnewyork.com/) (WASPy-cute kids clothing), [Lauren Moffatt](http://laurenmoffatt.net/) (a quirky contemporary clothing line), and [Hayden-Harnett](http://haydenharnett.com/) (bags, etc.).

More companies keep popping out of the woodwork, too, and so Jess is now trying to figure out how many she can handle, and if she needs a real ‘& Co.’ that ideally includes people who (unlike me) have at least some vague idea about the business of fashion.

Still, I couldn’t be prouder of her. I know, first-hand, how hard and stressful and nerve-wracking it is to get a company off the ground, and have been constantly impressed by seeing her handle it all with grace and aplomb.

I always wanted a sugar-mamma.

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June 27, 2008

Biding

A lot of my life seems to revolve around playing money middleman; waiting for investor dollars to come in for a project so I can turn around and send those dollars back out the door.

And the problem is, while Cyan and everything it does is hugely, consumingly important to me, it’s absolutely not so to our angel and institutional investors. So, even when they want to move ahead, even once they’re fully committed, it inevitably takes weeks and weeks and months to drag through trading documents and sending wire information and refreshing and refreshing and refreshing our bank’s web site to see if the funds have hit.

In the meantime, then, I’m forced to tell the people waiting on the other end, ‘any day now,’ and ‘really, any day,’ while I wait and they wait and we all wait together and they start to hate my guts for how long this is all taking even though I swear to god I’m just the middleman and none of this is my fault.

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June 5, 2008

True Story

During the second world war, a reconnaissance group of soldiers became lost in the Alps on a training mission. It was winter, they had no maps, and they seemed hopelessly lost.

They were preparing to die, when one soldier found a map crushed down at the bottom of his pack. With the map in hand, they regained their courage, bivouacked for the night, and proceeded out of the mountains the next day to rescue.

Only when they were recuperating in the main camp did someone notice that the map they had been using wasn’t a map of the Alps at all; it was a map of the Pyrenees.

When you are lost, any map will do.

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April 15, 2008

Updates

Still alive, still busy as f*ck, still essentially working two full-time jobs.

Latest bit of CFNYC news: the CrossFit hype continues, with cover stories the past two weeks in Men’s Journal and Muscle & Fitness.

Latest bit of Cyan news: looks like we just locked worldwide distribution rights to the film adaptation of Interpreter of Maladies.

No sleep till Brooklyn.

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April 11, 2008

Oh Give Me a Home

Though we’ve been searching for a new space for CrossFit NYC for some time (having even previously appealed to you all for help – thanks David and Chris!), we’re still no closer to actually moving.

As of today, it appears our third almost-home is falling through at the contract stage. This time, the landlord suddenly realized that a gym involves members coming and going – in other words, foot traffic – and decided he didn’t really want such a populous use of the space.

So, though we’ve managed to extend by legal wrangling the lease in our current location to April 30th (no mean feat, given we previously knocked down our downstairs neighbors’ ceiling), the countdown’s on.

Add in Cyan and wedding planning, and the ulcer countdown is doubtless on, too.

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March 17, 2008

Double Duty

I’m bossy. Very, very bossy.

At least, I assume I must be. Because I have the bad habit of taking increasingly demanding leadership roles in any organization with which I get involved.

Take, for example, the gym, CrossFit NYC. As one of the four founders, my role was largely fiscal (bankrolling the first year of startup) and ceremonial (teaching a handful of classes each week). But, with some recent personnel drama, and the growing sense that CFNYC could actually be very, very big (given our explosive membership growth over the past few months), it seems I’m now stepping things up, and becoming Managing Director.

Which is on top of Cyan, and everything we’re working on here. I haven’t pimped Cyan’s activities much of late, as after an over-slow 2007 I’ve been waiting for significant, concrete progress rather than vaporware to point to. But suffice it to say that we’re making surprisingly big strides on a lot of fronts – from a five-film slate to a $200m film hedge fund – that should make 2008 a considerably more exciting year.

And by ‘exciting’, I mainly mean ‘time consuming’. Two full time jobs, planning a wedding, heavy drinking. I think I’m going to have to go back to giving up sleeping and going to the bathroom to make it all fit.

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March 10, 2008

Lazyweb

Though poor Jess is now laid out with a cold (caught on the tail end of our immuno-supressed flu state; she’s predicting AIDS next on the rotation), I’m (for the time being, at least) feeling good, and working hard.

I am, however, pulling out my hair a bit on CrossFit NYC’s ongoing space search. In short, thanks to explosive membership growth, we’re now bursting at the seams in our current location, and though we’ve been searching hard for a suitable new home, we’ve mostly been coming up blank.

Our requirements:

  • 3000 sft or more;
  • $10-12k a month;
  • allowed to build in showers / locker rooms;
  • able to jump around and drop weights without bothering downstairs neighbors (whether that means basement or ground floor, or just an upper-floor light industrial space);
  • and, centrally located with good subway access (we’re currently at 38th and 6th, which is just about perfect).

A laundry list, I know. But, if you have any hot leads, I’d hugely appreciate an email, as I’m pretty sure bald isn’t my look.

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March 3, 2008

Bigger and Blacker

About three years ago, I started doing CrossFit workouts, following the free routines posted daily on the crossfit.com website. They were brief, they were intense, and they worked. I made faster progress in far less time than with anything else I had tried. I was hooked.

About two and a half years back, I started getting together with a couple of other idiots who had tried this CrossFit thing, for monthly workouts in Central Park. Misery loves company, and I quickly found I had more fun, pushed myself far harder, when working out with a group.

When the weather turned cold, we found a small gym on the Upper East Side that would let us, for ten bucks a head, use their space for our group workouts. A few more people heard about it and joined in, and they, too, made fast, significant progress. People would walk in the door unable to do a pullup, and six months later they’d be doing sets of twenty. Other clients at the gym, who over the same stretch of time might have moved up one notch on the lat pulldown machine, would leave their private trainers to work out with us instead. Then, fairly predictably, the trainers would get the owner to ask us to leave.

Lather, rinse, repeat. We lived through that find a place, grow the group, inadvertently steal clients, get kicked out cycle five times. After which, we were just bright enough to start seeing a pattern.

So, back in January of this year, we opened up a space of our own, the Black Box, just below Times Square. It was only 1500 square feet, up on the fourth floor of an old building. I cash-flowed the place myself, unsure whether it was a really dumb idea to have just opened a gym, unsure of whether anyone might actually show up.

But show up they did. And so did their friends. People would get results and brag about it, and now, ten months later and with zero advertising, we have more than a hundred members and nowhere near enough space.

My brother David very kindly took some time out of running his real estate development company to play unpaid broker, and helped find us a new space. We’re still trading lease documents back and forth, but by December 15th we’re hoping to be in our new home.

This second Black Box is nearly six times the size, and on the ground floor (which is good, as we inadvertently knocked down part of our downstairs neighbors’ ceiling in our current space with all of our jumping around). This time through, the stakes are higher. And so is the rent. I’m equally unsure whether opening this considerably larger space will turn out to be a really dumb idea.

But, as they say in CrossFit: get some, go again.

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November 19, 2007