++++++++++++++++++++++++ Three Point Plot Diagram ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Diagram ======= Beginning --------- As of about 2005. I work at a miserable job that I hate because I need the money. I'm married, my wife is in medical school, I have a kid on the way, and my wife wants us to buy a home. A nice home, too. I feel like I'm riding a bicycle across a tightrope with my wife and son balancing on my shoulders. Middle ------ I go from the frying pan to the fire. I quit my job to found a startup with my friend. At first I doubt my skills. I'm a self-taught computer programmer. I barely know what I was doing. A few years later, I know I'm not a genius, but I also know I built something that's pretty good. The business is going really well. But along the way, my marriage fell apart, my and we all became monsters, me included. It was the greed. So I quit. End --- Years later, I'm back at another awful job, but really, it's easy work. I don't care so much about it. I take walks in the park on my lunch break. And I feel pretty content. I'm divorced now. I have a much more modest life. Then an old coworker texts me and asks if I'll talk to his nephew about his software idea. Scratch ======= Then I realize my partner is killing our chances. I get him to step down and one of our early investors joins as the new CEO. It breaks Gene's heart, but he agrees, and one of our investors from the beginning joins. The new CEO raises a new round of investment and soon the business is really starting to grow. We have dozens of hospitals and nursing homes using the product I wrote from scratch. By the way, we're not making any profits. All the money we make off sales doesn't cover all our expenses. With the new investment money, I hire somebody to work with me. I realize I don't doubt myself any more. We become nearly best friends. I hire a second guy. And the three of us really gel. We hire a fourth person. With all of us working together, the product becomes amazing. The sales team explodes in size. Now we have new clients signing up every month. But I find myself arguing with the new CEO. He expects me to work my people too hard. He expects me to build whatever stupid ideas he comes up with, rather than letting me design stuff. The company becomes successful. Soon I have a team of people working for me. It's a mix of the best and worst. I love my team, and we all get to a point where we do amazing work together. But the new CEO is an incredible dick. He starts making Gene miserable and he tells me he is trying to get Gene to quit. Then I realize the CEO is also doing the same to me. He hires some of his friends from previous jobs. I wanted the company to focus on positive cash flow. The CEO wanted to grow aggressively and force a large company to acquire us The problem is that the founders, Gene and I, get diluted with each new share. So when I was fully vested in my common shares, and realized just how it was gonna go down, I quit. It was after an argument about a list of feature requests that made no sense to me. A few years later, I know I'm not a genius, but I also know I built something that's pretty fuckin good. One day I got an email from our attorneys that mentioned I was fully vested in my common shares. I started researching what that meant. I studied the details of the deals our CEO had been making to raise more funds. And it jumped right out at me. I was doing all the work, and when the company got bought out, I was getting scraps. I Then I study the business itself. discover that the money our investors gave us to start, and the money our CEO keeps raising from new investors, comes with all these obligations, and in the end, I did all the work, but they're gonna get all the money. We have a team of sales people flying around doing demos of my work and signing up companies. The success of the business is a cosmic referendum for my right to exist. A few years later, after I'm fearless, but also, I realize the investors are going to make almost all the money off the sale of the company. I The business took off. After years of struggle and heartbreak. and it was acquired for a lot of money, but he and I didn't get much of it. In the end, I realized I worked like a mad man and mostly, we just made the investors richer. They were happy to watch me and the people kill ourselves to make the business succeed, and they were the ones that got all the profits. And I'm sad about the friends I lost along the way. All over greed. And we didn't even get much. The CEO is raising more money from investors. I want us to focus on positive cash flows. I realize now that every addition End --- I quit and I go back to the grim job I used to have. But I leave at 4:30 PM and I don't care. When something blows up, I don't take it as a mark against my character. My marriage pretty much died, my partner and I were no longer friends. There are moments of stress and there are moments of happiness. After years of too much work, the product is stable and I start thinking about the business in general, beyond just keeping the website running. I start learning about all the other technical founders that have started companies and then have gotten screwed during acquisitions. I go back and study the documents I've signed and I realize that I was a sucker. I realize I got played. I start my own business with a very unreliable but very creative partner. I build a product that's amazing. I become obsessed with perfecting it. somebody else. He's heartbroken, but he does it. We hire one of our investors to be the new CEO. Our new CEO comes in and raises about two million dollars in new funds. The business takes off. We go from a few clients to thousands. I hire a few programmers and we become an amazing team. this thing for more than a year. I build something I'm proud of. I begin to loathe my partner. He is so unreliable. I force him to bring in one of our investors as the new CEO, after Gene fucks up too many times. I finally get the next version working. It's ugly and hard to use unless you're me, but there's nothing like it on the market. The first customers that use it are very impressed. One nurse says she would pay for it out of her own pocket. My friend Gene has off the chart ADHD. I help him at nights and weekends with his various ideas for software startups. One startup idea really catches on. We make a corporation. I barely pay attention to all the legal stuff because I'm constantly patching bugs and adding new features. After we get a few more customers, I quit my day job to work on it full-time after Gene raises $250k from local angel investors. I jump from the frying pan into the fire. I've already been writing this thing for more than a year. But now I'm going full time. I spend the next months in a shitty office in the corner of a warehouse. I write code, I draw diagrams on my dry erase board, I take walks, I get hand jobs from a local massage parlor, and I keep going. Yahh, see, that's part of it. I developed a secret double life along the way. If Gene is there, he and I start arguing. He wants to tell me how the system should work, but I don't care about his opinion. He's fucked up too many times already. I have to split time between working on the scheduler and then dealing with his customer service problems. He has a bad habit of lying about what the product does. There's a puzzle that's described in a lot of math and computer science textbooks. The nurse scheduling problem. It's one of those things, like the number of possible chess games, where there's many possible ways to organize a schedule. It doesn't truly solve the puzzle in the absolute sense. It generates guesses that are hopefully good enough, after you explain what you need. After we install it in our first set of customers, we know we got something good. We raise about two million bucks from investors after our first customers love the product. I forced Gene to step down as CEO and one of our angels comes in as the new CEO. Mark brought in the two million. After a few months, I start noticing odd shit. My work load is exploding though; the new scheduling engine needs a ton of screens to help people use it. Mark's team of "the best sales people that he's ever worked with" are hardly ever around. When Frank is around, he tells me stuff to do. I explain that we already got a project roadmap. The other guy, Don, passes out drunk in his office most afternoons. My boss gets fired. He and I stay in touch. He asks for help on some of his own business projects, so I write code for some business ideas, and he shops them around. In my heart, I don't believe his ideas are going any where. I feel guilty because he has a family and he's unemployed so I help him. One thing works OK. It's a way of helping shift managers at hospitals find somebody to fill in for a last-minute hole in the schedule. Like when somebody calls in sick. I tell him I'll do it if he can get me a year of salary, guaranteed in the bank. We set it up at several skilled nursing facilities. Gene wants me to quit to work on it full time. We close $250k from some local investors. I thought it was a debt written in blood, and if I failed at this, I imagine it will haunt me forever. In other words, I believe that failure is not allowed. People say they wouldn't do it but they admire me. I work like crazy on this startup after quitting in August 2007. 2009, we raise like two million after one of our first angel investors joined as our new CEO. I forced Gene to step down or I would quit. Probably a huge dick move, but Gene had fucked up too many goddamn times at this point for me to trust him. So I brought in Mark. I opened the door for everything that happened later. In the end, Mark took the company up to tens of millions in revenue in a few years. I wrote the code. Well, me and my team. Timmy, Evan Sarah, mostly. It was intense. And then I realized Mark was going to screw us all. I went to a talk by a California VC called "understanding your founder's shares" where the guy walked through it all. I realized I was so focused on building the technology that I didn't pay attention to the terms of the business. I figured I had no leverage to negotiate anyway. I had to take what they offered, or not take it. But then I saw how there was a strategy to them purposefully issuing all these new shares. The stated goal was to help us grow more quickly. In practice, it was really to adjust who really owned the company. Mark took a cut of each new issuance. Gene and I did not. So over time, as wave after wave of shares were sold, it was like issuing IOUs on our shares. And there was nothing I could do about it. Mark was adamant and all the other board members agreed that it was important to grow quickly, even if we were losing money. "We could be positive cash flow tomorrow but it would mean lowering our growth forecast." In other words, I saw my future as working at the same frenzied pace. I signed up to work like a madman for smaller and smaller chances of rewuards. One night I woke up in the night, sleep walked, fell down, banged my head. The next day I went to a strip club. The day after that I quit. End --- I'm back at the awful American Greetings Interactive division, watching with all the same absurdity, but just not really caring. I'm an hourly contractor now. I can't work more than 40 hours a week without the contracting firm getting paid overtime rates. One thing that's different is that a bunch of people quit, so management tried to make the place more fun, and there was a lot of discussion on our jabber server. I could do this as a conversation between two people as they walk to Rivendell. They let the nerds be in charge and so they renamed all the meeting rooms after places in Lord of the Rings. I worked on a project and I watched people work like crazy and hit deadlines and launch products that flopped. So then they'd scramble to add more features. I talked to my friends at lunch, though, and I told them all about the shenanigans I went through. I explain what a convertible note means. What preferred participating shares mean vs common shares are. What vesting schedules with cliffs mean. "I have like 3 million shares. If the company is acquired, there's a chance that somebody will buy them. But, for example, the JumpStart and North Coast investors will get 3x their money back up front. And then of the left overs, that gets split between the common shareholders." "This is actually common. A friend of mine from Texas told me he knows a guy that got $50k after a company he founded got bought, for the same reason. It's dilution, but it's also tiered system. They call it a liquidation stack." "It was an adventure. I leveled up. Then I got a call and somebody wanted to tell me about their idea. How the story starts ==================== I want to describe a period of my life. As of about 2005. I work at a miserable job that I hate because I need the money. I'm married, my wife is in medical school, I have a kid on the way, and my wife wants us to buy a home. A nice home, too. She said it was embarrassing to raise a child in an apartment. Hell, she tried to lie and say we lived in a condo to some new friends of hers. Anyhow, I'm a dude that's really stressed out money. But also, being a good provider. My wife is not from my background. She went to a private girls high school and her family went on nice vacations every year. My parents belonged to a church that no longer exists, but it still has a wikipedia page. Here's an excerpt that kinda sums it up:: During the 1970s, young adults drawn to the worship were invited to live in extended family households. Each household had a common purse, and all took part in the weekly food co-op distribution of fresh vegetables, fruit and milk. The community was also sent young men registered as Conscientious Objectors to work in their Medical clinics. The church had a noticeable effect on the surrounding neighborhood, as residents improved their care of houses and yards. Many families were separated children from their parents under commands from Church Elders in many cases sexual child abuse was the result. Children were often not told when or if thy were to return to their parents. It wasn't a great church to belong to. Also, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent a while in a psych hospital before I was born. She told us how she got shock treatment, but she could still feel God's presence. So, yeah, I had a lot of insecurity about my background. And about who I was in other ways too. I believed us getting married meant I was promising to take care of her, and that meant providing what she needed. And she needed stuff. I hustled to get from one job when we first moved to Cleveland to the next. This town is not easy to make it in. You need an inside connection to get hired because there's a lot of people showing up for every opening. So at this point, we moved to Cleveland, and I got a higher paying job at a consulting firm, doing really morally bankrupt shit, but I'll get into that later. Middle ------ One night at the miserable consulting job. It's Friday and it's 6:30 PM. I've been at work since like 7:30 AM or so. I'm heavier, like 190 or so. It's not good. One night I have two different partners telling me that their work is my top priority, and my boss is on instant messenger saying WHAT IS GOING ON I tell him he needs to talk to Lorna and Mary and get them to agree on what I should do. Meanwhile I'm debugging SAS code. The reports for this client don't make sense. I don't think the problem is in the code. I think we didn't get the right data from the client. See, at this job, we studied health insurance claims records for employers, and found who were the employees that family members that were costing the most I have 44 clients and some of the other consultants have less than 10. After a shitty few weeks at work, a recruiter calls me and says he can get me an interview at a place looking for python developers. I taught myself python a couple of years ago when I was in DC. I write SAS code all day for work. I got the IT admin to install python on our servers and a few times, its been helpful to write python scripts to automate scheduled jobs. Better than the confusing ksh scripts left behind. I interview, and this place is not like the consulting place. People are wearing t shirts and playing ping pong. I jump in between two nerds arguing about object oriented design. I ask them if they know how OOP is implemented in common lisp. "Like C++ and java let you write two or more versions of a method with the same name, as long as the types are different classes." "Dude you know lisp?" "Well I just took an AI class at CSU and the guy that teaches it said we could use whatever language we wanted for projects. So I forced myself to use common lisp. So I learned a little. It's really like the most insane language" I've been in graduate school at night for two years now. When I got to Cleveland, I found zero employers interested in my background as a systems analyst in the research and statistics division at the federal reserve board of governors. I had maintained some interactive web pages with perl that some other systems analysts had written. Added more reports, etc. I loved learning to program. I love the how it felt in my brain to read source code. Cleveland has been shrinking for decades now. But I got a job because living in DC, I learned how to use a software package called SAS. You write scripts of instructions and it generates reports from gigantic data sets. I had gone way off the deep end at learning SAS, thanks to some brilliant coworkers, my own curiosity, and abundant free time. So yahh, at this consulting place, I renovated their whole code base. I set up a wiki instance and helped my coworkers improve. In the interview at AGI I explain how there's gaps in my background. I have a degree in economics. I've learned enough about programming to do a lot of stuff, but I've never run a site that gets thousands of concurrent visits. So I start working at this place. It's better in so many ways. The pay is better. The system that they use is designed to withstand almost overwhelming amounts of traffic, by using queues as much as possible, rather than handling requests for work. Think like at a deli counter with tickets. Now you're free to go and keep shopping and then come back when your number is called. After a year and a half, I'm kicking ass at this place. I've been promoted twice. It's funny. I remember how the two people I talked to when I interviewed and the other people on my team all had computer science degrees. I was intimidated. I spent nights and weekends reading textbooks, trying to fill in all the gaps. Looking back, I rode myself too hard. After two years, I get moved to a new department and a new guy is hired to run it. My new boss, Gene. Gene had cool ideas and no patience for details. After like nine months, Gene is let go. He was always very disorganized and mixed really good negotiation skills with terrible follow through. It didn't surprise me. He was a kind boss and he got a big raise for me in the last annual review. My boss at work is let go. He was always very disorganized and mixed really good negotiation skills with terrible follow through. It didn't surprise me. He was a kind boss and he got a big raise for me in the last annual review. I felt guilty that I couldn't save him from himself. He had invited the team to his house multiple times and we had met his family. Like I said he was disorganized and unreliable, but also, truly compassionate. So he asked me if I'd work at night on business ideas he had, since I was a pretty fucking amazing web programmer. I was beginning to realize I was just better than most. It wasn't because I was smarter. It was because I knew ABOUT more stuff. I spent a lot of my time reading how people built weird shit, like PROLOG. At first, I'm nervous that I can hang with these guys, but I already spend nights and weekends learning everything I can about programming. Two years later, I'm a technical lead in charge of six guys here and a dozen dudes in India, and I'm running the buildout of three projects, and fixing bugs on a bunch more. I'm even more stressed out than working as a consultant. I'm on 40mg citalopram a day. I'm seeing a counselor because I get anxiety attacks. I know I'm good at my job. But I'm always in a stressed gear. I get on a new team and I get a new boss. He's not a programmer. He's there to set up deals with other businesses and I'll build it. End --- I'm back at the awful American Greetings Interactive division, watching with all the same absurdity, but just not really caring. I'm an hourly contractor now. I can't work more than 40 hours a week without the contracting firm getting paid overtime rates. One thing that's different is that a bunch of people quit, so management tried to make the place more fun, and there was a lot of discussion on our jabber server. I could do this as a conversation between two people as they walk to Rivendell. They let the nerds be in charge and so they renamed all the meeting rooms after places in Lord of the Rings. I worked on a project and I watched people work like crazy and hit deadlines and launch products that flopped. So then they'd scramble to add more features. I talked to my friends at lunch, though, and I told them all about the shenanigans I went through. Then I got a call and somebody wanted to tell me about their idea. Homework Assignment =================== create a 3 point plot diagram. Beginning: Write 1-2 sentences/bullet points describing your protagonist at the beginning of the story. Middle: Write 4-6 sentences/bullet points describing what the protagonist goes through in the middle of the story. End: Write 1-2 sentences/bullet points describing where your protagonist ends up at the story’s conclusion. .. vim: set ts=72 sw=4 expandtab syntax=rst: