Startup Mentality

I was down the pub yesterday lunchtime having a cheeky pint and a tai curry when the conversation turned to startup companies. More specifically the kinds of people who are willing to take the risk and the potential rewards you can expect.

We all more or less agreed that all the people we knew who'd done this deserved the rewards they got considering the risks they took. We also agreed that none of us had the right mentality to do this and were quite happy with the job security of coming into a company after this stage.

Afterwards I got to thinking: in academic terms wasn't this exactly what I did all those years ago? I mean I sold up and spent the money getting a foothold on an academic career. Given the time I spent doing it I did well and made a bit of a splash before I decided to stop.

I've just never thought of myself as this sort of risk taker before (or while I was doing it for that matter) but then I suppose I didn't see it as a risk since when I started out on, what I shall henceforth term "The hair brained scheme", I had little more ambition than pass PhD and sail off into the sunset in a small yacht. Yes, really, that was it! (I will get round to this story in time)

I suppose it helps if you have few ties when you're contemplating your hair brained scheme but it's interesting to contemplate that I might have the Cambridge startup mentality after all.

Once upon a time...

...I had a nice respectable job, house in the home counties, all the gold I could eat (apologies to Monty Python). Then for various reasons which I will ramble on about at a later date, I decided to sell up, move north and become an academic. All great fun while it lasted.

When I headed up north I was single which colours your outlook on life slightly. You're willing to accept the hit in terms of salary, the long hours and the lack of separation between work and home life but situations change. I'm remarried now with two wonderfully children (henceforth known as trouble one and trouble two) so I'm more worried about good schools than getting papers published.

Don't get me wrong, the family stuck it out past the point of reason but in the end job security won out (thank-you bankers and Coalition government). Now this presented us with a bit of a problem: I'm an embedded software engineer which is a bit of a specialized profession so we'd probably have to relocate. Weighing things up we decided being near one set of grandparents would be a plus so back down to Cambridge we went (plus if you know anything about Cambridge you’ll know it’s full of high-tech boffins starting companies to do this and that).

Did I mention I grew up in Cambridge? I'm that rare phenomenon, a local comprehensive kid who works in the high-tech industry in Cambridge. I'm not saying Cambridgeshire doesn't have some very good schools, after all we've decided to put our kids into them, it's just you don't meet a lot of locals in my line of work.

So what’s this all about then? Well I’ve been back just over a year and I’m still adjusting. It’s an odd experience fitting back into a life that you basically haven’t lived for 15 years. I keep bumping into people who I worked with years ago (Cambridge is basically a very small place). Things have changed but not that much.

But mostly I suspect it’s going to be about kids and schools.

We’ll see.