Today is a very important day for me. It is the two year anniversary of my company, Stonebrick Group. We got our first customer, LaunchSquad – a PR firm, on July 1 2003.
After selling BridgePath (an enterprise software company) in October 2002, I took some time off … reading, attending foreign policy conferences, going on trips with the military, learning … and then I started to get a little antsy.
So I did what every career advisor tells you to do but no one ever actually does … I decided to try to design my own job. One that I would absolutely love doing every day. And one that I would be able to excel at. It is tough to find both. I’d love to be a professional soccer player … but I don’t think that’s in the cards for me. And I might excel at a bunch of business things that I might not love.
So I designed my own job.
More than anything else, I love to help people. Especially when I can help people by connecting them with others for their mutual benefit (and therefore help two people at once). I love to help people build long-term relationships. Turns out, I’m actually good at it too.
So my only dilemma, before starting Stonebrick, was … would anyone ever pay me for that?
But LaunchSquad took a flyer on me. The four partners there (Jason Mandell, Jesse Odell, Jason Throckmorton, and Brett Weiner) are terrific to work with and worked with them for 16 months — helping them build long-term relationships. LaunchSquad was a five person company at the time. Now they are triple the size, just took over an entire floor of a downtown San Francisco office building, and have large expansion plans.
Then Zoom Systems became my second client in August 2003 and I started working with Clarium Capital that September. Since then, we’ve had 18 customers including Microsoft, Sanyo, Gerson Lehrman Group, Travelocity, CB Richard Ellis, and others.
And so today, I sit back and reflect … I am extremely thankful to be doing what I do. I love going to work every day. For me, helping others build relationships is the best job in the world.
I say only slightly jokingly that Auren is my hero. He’s created a life which is full of interesting people, and which suits his unique talents. I’m always sending people to Auren, telling them, “If you need to connect with someone, Auren’s your man.”