A Labor of Love

I love what I’m doing! Sure, it remains to be seen whether my startup is successful. We have no products, no customers, no revenue and I’m working out of my basement with no income. But I love what I’m doing.

What prompted this sudden proclamation? Well, I happen to have recently met several colleagues from my former company. Listening to them brought back the feelings as to why I left and increased my appreciation for what I am doing now. The challenges, personal growth, and gratification this new experience is bringing me are things that had been long lacking in my big-company job.

As far as Uniqarta goes here is a quick summary of what’s happening:

  • We’ve hired our first employee who starts at the end of April.  In conjunction with that we will be renting space at the incubator that is on the North Dakota State University for our first office.
  • Doug Crane has continued to build the relationship with our paper manufacturing partner.  At the end of this month we are meeting with them and one of their end customers to learn more about their end application and confirm it as our initial focus.  We also will start the process of defining our business model with the paper company. There are many options how to configure our relationship and it is not clear at the moment which would be best.
  • Val Marinov and I attended a major RFID conference two weeks ago in Orlando.  I gave an invited presentation about our technology which received good interest.  We now have a number of interested parties across different application areas.
  • I’m starting to put together materials with which to brief investors. While I won’t formally start raising money until the fall I do plan to meet informally with certain investors in the May-August time frame to establish some relationships and get some early feedback.