Old Dog, New Tricks:

Wow what a powerful programming language. I started to use Ruby for the first time today. Simple and Fun, I am not sure that a language could be described like that. This reminds me of the way I felt when I started ColdFusion.

I had not written a line of code for 3 years of more, thanks to the success of financialaid.com. But it was great getting back into it. The idea that you can create from nothing is very empowering. So I am reading a good book on Ruby now, "Ruby in 21 Days." It is very simple, but for a brain like mine, simple is great.

This reminds me about a change in mind set that I needed to make back in '94. I thought that I had missed the Internet Revolution, I had started a clothing company that sold shirts over the internet, but thought that I would not get a chance to leave my mark. By '98 I was sad that I had missed the bus and many of the people that I knew were becoming wealthy and having a lot of fun. However, in late '99 I came up with the concept for financialaid.com. We wrote a business plan and pitched 17 venture capitalists, 15 of whom said flat out no. Two said yes, however, the terms were so terrible we turn them down.

The point is, as the industry changed it became near impossible to raise money and you had to run real businesses. We changed our thinking and bootstrapped, raised $75,000 from friends and family and when we sold the company, the three original owners maintained 96.25% of the equity.

Change is good. Don't let preconceived notions weigh you down. Most everything can be done if there is enough conviction.

Cheers to conviction.

Mike