2015: The Year of Networking

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Happy New Year! I hope you all have had an enjoyable holiday season. Here in the Oasis, the family and I have been enjoying some time together. My wife cooked up over ten pounds of fudge and several dozen cookies with my daughter’s help. I spent the better part of Tuesday removing the 3 inches of snow and half inch of compressed ice and sleet from my driveway and sidewalk. I’m thankful that we really dodged a bullet with this storm. Most of the thick ice fell to our east, most of the snow fell to our north and west, and the heavy flooding rains stayed to our south. Winter is definitely here.

I thought I’d take a few minutes and look back over the past year. I know – totally cliché. However, I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished over the past year working to get my freelance operation off the ground and learning the entrepreneurship ropes. Coming from a public health and family caretaker background, entrepreneurship was completely uncharted territory. At the end of 2014, I had only had the chance to get to a handful of 1 Million Cups presentations at the Iowa City CoLab (which dates my attendance because the ICCoLab was two venues ago.) I hadn’t yet made it to the Vault in Cedar Rapids or to any of the networking events either in Iowa City or Cedar Rapids. Also, my wife was deep into inpatient residency rotations at the hospital, so I was the only caretaker for our daughter. Things were busy, but mostly having to do with the house and the kid.

When this last spring and summer rolled around, I had the opportunity to start attending more entrepreneurship events due to some strategic help from my brother, who watches my daughter on Wednesday mornings so that I can attend 1 Million Cups, and my mother-in-law, who is able to take care of the small one during the summer months. Then, my wife and I found out that we are having another daughter. In September, my wife was put on leave from work due to complications from the pregnancy and has been staying home with our daughter. This long stretch of help from family afforded me the opportunity to soak in as much from the startup community in eastern Iowa as I possibly could over the past nine months. I was able to make it to:

Also, I got to hang out with geese and watch joggers.

Also, I got to hang out with geese and watch joggers.

It’s not just big events that have populated the calendar… I’ve also spent the day doing some coworking in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. The amount of coffee that I’ve consumed over the past year in definitely on the order of dozens of gallons. I’ve learned enough in the past year through both traditional classroom time (in the case of Venture School) and experiences that I feel like I’ve picked up another master’s degree. I am only now starting to realize how much I don’t know about startups and how complicated it truly is to run a small firm.

The great part is that I have all next year to pick up more knowledge. With the new baby coming, I’ll be taking a bit of a hiatus from networking and at least of the 1 Million Cups presentations from mid-January until roughly the end of May. However, there are a few big events that I’m really looking forward to coming up this spring:

During the interim, I’ll be posting information from my “Linux for Super Beginners” project. I’ve decided to create a Web site for that rather than post those chapters to this blog. I have raw versions of all of the chapters done, as well as about 90 percent of the images and screen shots that accompany the chapters. I’ll be polishing those and finishing coding the Web site in the next couple of weeks.

Stay warm out there. There’s a lot of work ahead of us.