Turning Nothing into Something

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”

-Andy Warhol

I have always had business on the mind.

The first memory I can recall having for a viable business plan came when I was in second grade. My mom had just signed us up for America Online, the internet access program.

In 1992, very few people really understood what the internet was. So my mom made me take a class at the community college with her to learn about the internet.

At first, my brother and I just used the internet to go into sex related chat rooms and tell 25 year old ladies that we wanted to “cyber”. After a few months, the Cybercool (me) and Cyberfire (my brother) screen names were banned from just about every AOL chat room.

Then we discovered computer games. We thought that these were just the most amazing things ever made but they were terrible to play on the slow dial up connection. We began to scheme and plan to get a high speed internet connection.

In 1992, there were no commercial DSL or cable internet connections available. If someone wanted to get something faster than dial up they had to invest in a T1 connection that would cost $1000 per month (too much for video games).

Our solution to this dilemma was simple, be the people that sell internet. We knew that there were only two companies selling internet in our region at this time, America Online and Prodigy and they charged $19.99 and $12.99 per month, respectively, in 1992. We knew that we could sell internet for $5 per month and easily find at least 20 people to purchase the internet connection from us.

A T1 connection is capable of supporting 28 dial up users, all downloading at maximum speed, at once. Not everyone would be online at the same time and people would not be constantly downloading. Therefore, this was a viable business plan.

There were numerous advantages gained from purchasing dial up internet access from a local provider rather than a large corporation. First, the majority of the decreased speed of dial up was caused by the distance that the connection needed to travel over the dual copper wires that made up the old phone network. If that distance was only across town rather than across the state the connection would be much faster. Second, paying $5 per month is better than pay $12.99 or $19.99 per month.

All that was required to give someone internet access at this time was to have a phone line that people could dial into and a computer that was already connected to the internet that could answer the phone call with a modem.

My brother and I subscribe to the mentality “if we like it then everyone will probably like it”. While examining our goals we realized the reason we had thought this entire thing out was to play video games. We added the final change to the plan, the cherry on top, a game database.

A game database would make more money. It would attract customers that would want access to thousands of games and they could be charged a small fee for each game they downloaded. At this time games were tiny, even on dial up they could be downloaded in less than an hour or so.

In 2002, ten years after our plan, there were approximately 5,000 businesses that followed the exact business plan of purchasing high speed internet and selling it to dial up users. In 2006, three companies were created that allowed people access to a database of videogames. An example is gamefly.com.

This was intended to be a personal essay but my brother and I are very closely related on the subject of business. Both of us are constantly having innovative plans for businesses that are not necessarily spawned out of the goal of making money but from the need to fix a problem that we have.

I am continually having ideas like this as it is what I enjoy to think about. I like thinking about how I could improve something so that I would be happier after modifications to the system, organization, or design.

For most of my life my thoughts have gone back to this type of thought process without a conscious decision. When I was in college and I began learning about the way the business world actually worked and grew, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

When I entered business as my chosen major, which is in a way saying that you will be in business in 15 years, I was very hesitant. I knew that there was a significant possibility of ending up at a cubical job with an ass hole idiotic boss and very little financial breathing room. What kind of life would that be? Maybe my dad was right, maybe becoming a doctor is the way to go. It is not so bad being worked to death in the educational system until you are 32 to get a doctorate in nuclear medicine. It would not be so bad being on call for 36 hour shifts occasionally. At least I would be able to be independent and not really have a boss.

I just have to trust that my intellect, creativity and knowledge are enough to set me apart in the business world.