Reality Check did not fill the whole bucket.
The CTO job was interesting. I was one of three executives, the work touched data centers and managed services, and I had room to change a lot. The piece I still missed was being an entrepreneur.
I wanted to create a service, take it to market, and help decide where the company went.
I wrote to somebody I had trusted since the early Beatport years and asked whether he wanted to build again. Beatport had been the beginning of a lot for both of us. We had learned, grown, and had a ridiculous amount of fun doing it.
Since leaving, I had explored cloud infrastructure at Peek, mobile devices, telephony, managed hosting, and customer operations. Peek's funding trouble had cut that job short, but the company was now a small client and partner. Reality Check had shown me where a traditional hosting business worked and where it stopped being interesting.
The new idea was a managed infrastructure company for growing technology businesses. It would combine dedicated hardware, cloud systems, virtualization, load balancing, firewalls, storage, and the software required to make those pieces manageable.
I already had a few small clients and access to data-center space. What I needed was somebody who understood finance, marketing, equipment, and how to turn technical capability into a real company.
The idea was not especially sexy. I said that directly. It looked bootstrappable, relatively low risk, and capable of producing enough profit to fund more ambitious projects later.
The note went out while I was ending a ridiculous travel loop through Amsterdam, Kansas City, Denver, and Austin.
The subject was “New beginnings.” That was what I wanted.