Hasta La Gadget!

Are entrepreneurs born or raised? Should I start my own company or try to make headway in the one I am in? These are questions we face when things are not going the way we would like, which happens more often than we want to admit.

At first blush we may think that entrepreneurs are born risk takers who have special traits like drive, talent, initiative and resolve. It’s an oversimplification, based on my own journey as high-tech entrepreneur. I will share with you my story, the inflection point, and the guiding beacon on this journey to and through entrepreneurship.

When I encountered this fork in my career path, I did not have an inkling of business sense or any demonstrated capabilities for taking financial risk. I never dreamt that I would start a company. My father in India was an engineer in military services. Military families like mine looked down on business people, as we considered ourselves more polished and educated. Yet I jumped off my steady high paying job as an engineering manager at Northern Telecom in Palo Alto, California, with no definitive plans and ended up starting a company.

I started Digital Link Corporation 30 years ago in Silicon Valley. We made hardware electronic products, which later became internet connectivity products, leading to the company’s IPO. Starting a product company is riskier than starting a consulting company, as there are no revenues until the product actually starts to sell. Starting a hardware company is an even greater risk than starting a pure software company, as extra capital is needed for inventory, in addition to the usual product development, sales and marketing expenses. I had bootstrapped the company with our own $50K money. We had exhausted all our savings. There would have been no second chance had the first product failed. Three years after founding, when we were profitable but I had yet to take a penny home, we attracted $1M in venture capitalist money and six years after that, we took the company public. That was in 1994, at the dawn of the internet age. Our investors earned 13 times ROI, and my husband and I were able to upgrade our standard of living, finally.

To build the company, I was able to attract high-quality executives. Our major customers were big telecom names like WorldCom, Bell Canada, British Telecom, who trusted our devices in their critical networks. All this was highly against the odds… even in high-tech. What was driving me? As I reflect, I recognize that I do not take failures kindly. Perhaps that is what motivated me to not give up even when the going got tough – facing early departure of my partner from the company, and having two daughters during the startup phase, amongst many others.

I also faced an inflection point, at the time I decided to leave my job. After completing my master’s in electrical engineering from UCLA, I had worked for 11 years in the Valley. I was nearing 35 years of age and felt that I had not accomplished much. After 10 years of marriage, we had hit a bump in the road, and at the same time I got passed over for a promotion at work that I deserved. My melancholy changed my course. I resolved to take charge of my life, to resign from the company and then take time to decide my next step, so that I could think much differently. I did not know what I would do and where I was heading, but it did not seem to matter. At my farewell lunch at Nortel, an associate asked me to give him a call if I ever thought of starting a company. The rest is history.

This is important because when we reach such a juncture in life, our appetite for risk suddenly goes up..we start thinking outside the box because known paths no longer satisfy us sufficiently. We feel hyper-energized, almost powerful, to do something different and more worthwhile.

If you are considering an entrepreneurial path, don’t do it for money and don’t do it because the market is good. If you are happy with your current professional track, stick with it and put more energy into it so that you can go further and faster.

Finally don’t hesitate to launch on your own, if and only if, your own instincts and inner voice are prompting you to do so. However it will take time and effort to listen to this voice which often tends to get drowned by external messages. This insistent inner voice is the guiding beacon as you embark on this journey.

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Ever think about getting stuck on death row for no reason and with no recourse? It’s not a cakewalk.

Take, for instance, the case of Glenn Ford, sentenced to death in Louisiana for killing a watchmaker. Four people were suspected of the murder but Glenn was the only one to stand trial, convicted partially by the testimony of another suspect’s girlfriend. Even with top legal counsel assigned to him on appeal (the guarantee to post conviction counsel is a recent development) he spent 29 years 3 months and 5 days on death row and 23 hours of each one in solitary confinement. Finally, the real killer confessed and the state let Glenn go. He passed away 15 months later.

Mr. Ford’s story is one example of how the judicial system needs committed watchdogs, and here’s the story of one you should know.

At the age of 21, a woman in California was studying belly dance and her life took a sharp turn when she heard about her dance instructor’s second passion – fire dancing. The idea of fire dancing intrigued her, but she felt she could never do such a thing. Then she asked herself “why not?” That’s how Mistress K, fire dancer extraordinaire, was born.

Shortly after her baptism by fire, she took a backpacking excursion through Europe and wound up doing some impromptu street performances during Fete de la Musique in Paris and then in various other cities across Europe while hanging out with the juggling community. After a brief stint back in the States, she found herself in Berlin on a semester abroad and wanted to extend her time there, but cash was tight. Without a valid work visa, it was back to her fire routine and soon she was asked to be the entertainment at a local bar that had a fake beach. It provided her a captive audience and it paid.

Let’s skip from Germany to Los Angeles and then NYC, where she fell in with something a little different, a burlesque crowd. Great as these gigs were, there was a lot of competition among the dancers. The backstage politics took the fun out of it, and she realized that her heart was really with the circus and sideshow. Sideshow performers can have an antihero quality that keeps backstage egos and cattiness to a tolerable, muted hum. A sideshow performer simply can’t get too full of himself after a long day of pounding nails into his head. The Mistress preferred that sideshow sensibility and stuck with it. She moved down South and eventually organized her own show, which she took to several cities across the US.

But, just as Clark Kent leads a secret life as Superman, the Mistress also leads a secret life as Carrie, whose special power is keeping people from fates worse than death. In other words, when she’s not publicly performing death-defying challenges, she works with people who are facing them in real-life.

Carrie went to college for social work and public health, working with alcoholics and homeless people who arrived at the precipice of society and, often, arrived at the edge of their lives. That led to working for a capital defense office that represented death row inmates during the final stage of their appeals. She had three roles in each case: review all prosecutorial evidence to see what might have been omitted in a case; review all defense evidence to see if there were any acts of negligence, and personally get to know the people facing execution. It doesn’t always overturn a case, even when it can be proven that the person doesn’t understand their sentence, or that their defense failed to mention vital extenuating circumstances – like, they’re not a flawless person but they just didn’t do it.

In fact, few people are exonerated every year for being falsely convicted of a capital crime. Killing the rest, innocent or not, is expensive. Florida alone spends $24 million per execution. Police chiefs call the death penalty the least effective way to deter crime, and 61% of voters would prefer a remedy other than the death penalty for the punishment of murder.

The number of sentences dropped slightly over the last decade and the number of exonerations increased from about 3 to 5 per year since 1987.

While Carrie found the work on death row challenging and interesting, bringing her into contact with great legal minds and mental health experts, the resolutions were few if they appeared at all. The frustrations of the death penalty were, metaphorically, killing her. She’s taken a break, recently informing us that she’s now working with severely mentally ill offenders as they are released from prison. In her words, “You know – nice, mellow work.”

At night, Mistress K continues to present the art and the illusion of danger. By day, she still practices the art of making real-life dangers an illusion. Perhaps it’s time for America to stop making a carnival out of our justice system, and put the sideshow in charge: those people with antihero qualities that keep backstage egos and cattiness to a tolerable, muted hum.

***

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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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