So it appears that my life is punctuated by double degrees. Leaving aside the more asinine adventures of my youth, I’ll start the story with my undergrad.
At my core I’m a generalist, a jack-of-all-trades. It’s always been that way, I’d cut basketball practice for debate meets and debate practice for chess club and chess club for play rehearsals and you get the idea. The takeaway from this is not that I don’t like practice (which was my parents fear for a number of years) rather, I love everything. Specifically I enjoy and get energized by the passion that others bring to activities they love. In terms of a Myers-Briggs type indicator that makes me an Extrovert; the definition in this case being someone who gets their energy from others.
The other point (and we’ll come back to this one later) is that because I didn’t specialize I was never as good at whatever it was as the people that inspired me. I didn’t score a triple-double every game but I’d chalk up 16-20 points and cleaned the glass pretty well; when one of my classmates posited an advanced proof or solution to a problem I’d follow their line of thinking and see how they got there but I didn’t come up with the idea myself. And because I was surrounded by people who excelled in their field, I ended up in the support role. If someone has the technical nous to design a new self adjusting headrest or a flail system for removing 200kg of carbon from the top of an anode without destroying the carbon then you let them do it and help where you can.
So back to the story, I went to university to study engineering and decided that for an extra year I could also get myself a computer science degree so why not? It was the middle of the dot-com boom and I had visions of retiring at 30 to an island in the pacific. My engineering major was mechatronics, a combination of electronics and mechanical with a side of programming and control: the jack-of-all-trades engineer.
By third year I’d started a software company with the top 4 guys from my class, talking each of them round and my first business was born: Arcane Software. We did everything. If you wanted a java applet that replicated MSPaint on a webpage, we’d code it. If you wanted an SQL database of stock and inventory built, we’d do it. With the internet booming everyone wanted an online presence and we were knocking out electronic stores like it was going out of fashion (which they did, about 3 months after they went live). We lasted 6 months. I’d successfully burned out the entire team and while we’d made enough money to cover the new laptops and the caffeinated beverages (and don’t forget the beer) when the bubble burst and the work dried up the team breathed a sigh of relief and returned to study.
At that point I was hooked. I rolled through the remainder of my engineering degree (my credit being somewhat thin in the CS department I finished up there quietly and got out) laying the groundwork for starting an engineering company. At the completion of my undergrad I finally understood what engineering was (the practical application of science and maths to solve problems) and with the two brightest roboticists from my contact list, started another company.
Returning to the second point I made above, the company wasn’t going to succeed based on my technical know-how so I became involved in all the other facets: company setup; accounting and budgeting; sales and marketing; testing and; strategy. My background for this was reading a few books and approaching it with the atypical 22-year old attitude of “I’ll wing it”. Which we did, more or less.
What Tim Learned at Business School 