Scott Jones

I don’t want to toot my own horn too loudly, but I’ve always had a knack for identifying business opportunities. Or at least had ideas along the lines of what I thought could be a good business.

In high school I thought there should be a place for pottery and painting where you could go for a date = Paint The Town, PotteryPotentials, and Color Me Mine. In college I thought an online shopping mall was a good idea = Amazon.com, Yahoo! Shopping, and eBay. A couple years back I thought a voice-enabled telephone directory that would read you any content you wanted from the Web was a good idea = Tellme networks, recently acquired by Microsoft.

Those examples are just a few of the many. I have a folder on my laptop with over 20 business ideas I’ve dreamed up over the last 10 years, several of which I’ve written complete business plans for. The others I found out someone else was already on it.

Then there’s those few business ideas I continue to gravitate to but for one reason or another haven’t gone after whole-heartedly. LeapSpace is one of those businesses, and the one I see the most need for. Including and especially given the current economic condition. I’m a firm believer that there’s a huge opportunity for a business like LeapSpace! So I’m back to thinking about it seriously, despite currently being on contract at Microsoft.

More than just thinking about it, I’m going to start networking again, shopping the idea more, and putting some feelers out to see if I can’t just put a local team together to build out the missing pieces:  someone who’s good with databases; someone who is a gifted web engineering/developer. Are you that person? Know someone who is?

This business is nagging, which I can live with. It’s the haunting I’ll bring upon myself if I don’t take some sort of action which I can’t live with.

It’s been six months since I’ve posted to this blog. And a long, strange trip it’s been.

After working hard on LeapSpace for a couple of months with a key partner, negotiations stalled. The equation was simple for me - get what you pay for. In other words, if I pay to develop something net-new, I should own it. But that’s not how the partner saw it. So I walked. And LeapSpace has been put into a holding pattern for now. Which in retrospect, given the way the economy has shaped up (or down, for that matter) and life’s little circumstances, that’s probably a good thing.

So where have the hours been spent from then until now. First, on an incredible travel adventure with my wife - motorcycling 4500 miles to Alaska. I of course put a web site together to document the journey, from acquisition and prep of the bike, through trip planning, to blogging about the trip itself. We also used the trip as an occassion to raise awareness and donations for the Ronald McDonald House. Just today we delivered a check for $2,000 to the Seattle RMH, which was incredibly rewarding. Especially since my previous charitable cause, the Bigs Cool Card, was dropped by Big Brothers Big Sisters of King and Pierce Counties.

Second, spending time working on our vacation cabin down in the Hood Canal area. I’m just about finished converting a detached shed into a bunkhouse, doubling the sleeping space: new windows and doors, electrical, structural reinforcements, new exterior siding, insulation and walls. As an owner of my own home plus rental houses, I’ve gotten to be pretty handy. The shed project has taken it to a new level, and I have to say it’s quite fulfiling to work with your hands every now and then.

Third, gearing up for an addition to the family! Not long after the Alaska trip, my wife and I got the great news that we’re expecting our first baby. We had tentatively planned on trying after our return. But I sure didn’t expect it to happen so soon! Must have been all that fresh air on the motorcycle. In any case, we’ve been busy talking, reading, planning, and otherwise prepping for what I’m sure will be a monumental change to our lives. In a good way. Right?!

That, of course, led to serious thinking about getting the income train back on track. Which has me now immersed again in the world (sucked back by its monumental gravity) of Microsoft, my frienemy. This time I’m working on the Windows Mobile launch team, working on the next wave of releases. The work isn’t particularly fulfiling and the mega-culture is a major turn-off, but the pay is great and it’s an opportunity to expand my resume to include more high-profile product launches in both the B-to-B and B-to-C market spaces.

What, then, of LeapSpace? It’s on hold but certainly not forgotten. The irony is the last two times I’ve gone back to work on launches at Microsoft (previously working on the launch of Windows Server 2008), the entrepreneurial fire in me has been stoked. The opportunity for super quick go-to-market via partnership was blunted on the last try, but that doesn’t mean LeapSpace is a bad idea! Heck, it’s more relevant than ever given what’s happened to LeapSpace’s target markets! It’s just that buying 70% (the asset) and renting 30% (the commodity) of the total solution from the same partner isn’t going to work. But momentum is pushing, albeit slowly given my work load, toward building the engineering team myself to build the asset. In the long term, that’s probably a better $trategy anyway.

There’s been an interesting drama playing out slowly and painfully in Seattle - the demise of the Seattle Sonics, set to be moved by the new owners of the team to Oklahoma City sometime in the near future. Like everything else, there’s a backstory that’s failing to be covered by the local news media:  The story of public funding for sports arenas. The short version is Howard Shultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, sold the team to an Oklahoma City investment group because he wasn’t getting anywhere with having Key Arena, the existing stadium, overhauled or replaced completely. So he sold the team to an ownership group which he knew was going to move the team. Thus I have chosen to boycott Starbucks - Howard Shultz has effectively back-stabbed the town that played host to his rise… bastard. But I digress.

Key Arena was overhauled in the mid 1990’s, with the public picking up 3/4 of the tab. A modern arena has less than a 10-year life before needing to be overhauled? No wonder Howard got a cold shoulder from the City of Seattle. Add the start of slowing in the local economy. Monies needed for other causes, like education and transportation. And let’s not forget that the public already had foot the bill in large part for two other new sports complexes - Safeco Field and Qwest Stadium. But there’s where the crux is, I think - Howard and friends stuck in a ‘me-too’ mentality with no regard to other external factors and timing. Rebuild the team (which happens to be the current state of affairs), grow the fan base locally, wait out some of the economic downturn, THEN ask. Give us a product to get behind. At least give us hope! Or just give up and pocket $200M in profit by selling the team prematurely to a pack of move ‘em out wolves. Of course $200M sounds pretty nice to me - but I’m not already a multi-millionaire. And even still, I don’t think I could do that to the people of Seattle. We deserve better.

Yesterday was April 15th, tax day in the USA. How’s the saying go… “There’s nothing certain but death and taxes”. For me, I’d add “frustration with taxes”.

Because I have rental properties, two S-corps, and a litany of other deductions, I pay for the services of a tax accountant. Heck, their services are tax deductible! Yet despite spending hours preparing for their services,  including classifying and summarizing every number they need, this year they didn’t get my taxes done on time. With that news came the addition that it looks like my wife and I owe several thousand dollars. Wish they could have forecast that when I met with them in November to review everything! So I filed an extension, sent in a check way higher than I imagined, and soon I’ll being paying a high fee to my accountant for the pleasure. What a racket. 

My real gripe isn’t with my accountant, though. It’s with the IRS. Could they make the tax system any more complicated? If it were easier, and there wasn’t so much fear of messing up and being subject to an audit, I’d just do it myself. Why isn’t there ‘audit insurance’ being sold to businesses that will take care of everything if you mess up - I’d rather pay them the $1,000! And why aren’t all those ridiculous city and state business taxes I pay deductible since I’m running an S-corp, where business profits are taxed on the owner’s personal income taxes?! 

Complain, complain. As my father says, “Being upset about paying more taxes is a good thing - it means you made more money”. That and the fact that all things considered, America taxes less than most other first-world countries, and it’s still the land of fruit and honey. Early retirement is still out there, it’s just a few more months off after yesterday.

The squibble and public relations maneuvering of Yahoo! and Microsoft is highly entertaining. What’s more entertaining to me is how a loser of a business since it’s inception (MSN) is taking a big stick approach to the much more successful business (Yahoo!). All of this of course is courtesy of Microsoft’s deep pockets generated by its Windows and Office products. But it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t been trying with MSN - they’ve sunk MILLION$ into this business since the late ’90s, but have never surpassed Yahoo!, or Google for that matter. 

So if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em. And buy ‘em for cheap, play dirty if you have to, and have no qualms about it. Personally, I hope Yahoo! and its shareholders stick to their guns. Microsoft needs Yahoo! much more than Yahoo! needs Microsoft. And Microsoft knows it. If it weren’t for the current soft market conditions, Microsoft’s offer would have to go up to be commeasurate with Yahoo!’s long-term value. Not just Yahoo!’s value to its’ shareholders, but add the strategic value to Microsoft - instant market share, instant technology portfolio improvement, instant work force, instant gigantic audience to advertise to, instant leg-up against Google.