User Profile

We're Nick & Julia, a couple of 20-something idealists. You probably know the type. We bike instead of drive, buy local and organic food, volunteer, read the news, and adopt stray animals. But we dream of more: we also want to be ruthless, insanely wealthy capitalists. Significant change requires significant resources. We're glad people are out there living humbly and simply, but we think selling out is the most responsible thing we can do.

We're apparently pretty clever. We have two college degrees (Nick does genetics, Julia does biopsychology) and now we're working on the grad school thing. We're both successful professional web developers/sysadmins (we even survived the bubble). However, we're fairly new to the business side of the business world. Until now we've been paid to make other people's ideas happen — but we realize that will only make us "well-off", and we can't stop there. So we're striking out on our own. We're creating this blog to document our forray into entrepreneurship.

Since we have the skills to implement some of our own projects, we're starting there. We're investing our time in ourselves, creating things we want and learning management and marketing by trying to make them thrive. We're exploring — setting different things up and seeing which ones stick. Some of our ideas are bound to be stupid, which is why we're starting with the cheap ones. However, we're pretty sure we've got at least a few real winners. The only way to find out is to try.

Nothing in the first (or second, or third) round is likely to make us rich, but they don't have to — they just have to make enough to fund the next round. Ideally, we'd like to be millionaries in ten years, billionaires in twenty, and financing the solutions to all the world's problems in twenty-one.

Our startup assets include our mad development skills, a bit of shamelessness, and a web server. We'll earn, teach ourselves, and eventually buy or hire the rest. Donations of good advice would be most appreciated.

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So far, our schemes include:

Split the Money: a quick and dirty instantiation of the Dream of the Internet. LJ meme, popularity contest, creative greed-fest wish list all mixed up with some good old fashioned advertisement-generated revenue. Most of the account holders are already people we've never heard of, so perhaps it's struck a chord. Check it out and maybe you'll get lucky too!