Lots of pimpin!

Ahoy pals! It's hard to believe it's been almost 3 years since I've posted anything. I've been hard at work, pimpin hard and pimpin harder. In that time period, a lot of things have happened. I scaled up from having equipment in one local facility, to having equipment in two local facilities, 5 more domestic facilities in other markets, and one other in the UK. I acquired an ASN which now announces nearly 20,000 IPs, carries multiple downstream BGP customers, and speaks BGP with three upstreams. I started a VPS business based on the Xen platform, supporting some 200 customers. And in my in-between time, I've been developing software that I collectively refer to as the CRM, which is a datacenter automation package that is more complete and supports better end-to-end management than anything on the market today - notably Ubersmith Datacenter Edition.

I'm also guilty of a few mistakes along the way. Part of pimpin harder is learning from them. The bible says "confess your sins, one to another," so here goes. I bought too much networking equipment early on, which mostly collected dust and is now worth a fraction of what I paid for it. If I had saved that money, I'd be in a better position for growth now. I also lacked perspective on what I was doing at the time, so whereas a Juniper M40 with a couple of GigE interfaces might have seemed like a good idea in 2006, it's not quite as viable in 2009. GigE is no longer the currency - 10GE is. If you express interest in buying a 10GE circuit, carriers will shut up and take notes. To date I've never dealt with any 10GE. Once I discovered that there were certain Riverstone configurations that would route and run ACLs at line-rate GigE, I should have completely abandoned the Juniper notion until I had a reason to question the viability of Riverstone (thus far they've been fine). So they money I would have saved by abstaining from buying gear would have put me in a position to buy with the currency of the day, 10GE. I also neglected to use more common sense when negotiating for space in Jacksonville. I entered into an agreement for much more space and much more money than I could comfortably sustain. At the time I didn't know it was unsustainable, as my growth projections looked just fine and I couldn't think of any reason not to do it. But the deal was predicated on the fact that I had no assurance from my landlord that I could continue growing in a shared colo space, like I was prior to 2008. Finally, I failed to capitalize on the market correctly by continuing to advertise regularly, even despite indicators that its effectiveness was futile. I did not realize at the time that all it took was one or two powerful clients to materialize from those efforts, with a significant amount of revenue, to kick my business up to the next level.

Right now I'm continuing to do the day-to-day activities as best I can, while I plot a course for the next phase of my business and my life. I once said during a Shoutcast mixshow to some of my friends, that "a birthday is a good milestone of your pimping". You get to look back and say.. man I did this when I was 23, and man I did this when I was 24 or 25.. it's a good indication of how you can step up your game, and how your game has been stepped up over the years. I can look back and determine how my game has been stepped up every couple of years. When I was a little kid, I purportedly liked to take the hinges off of all the doors in the house using a screwdriver. When I was 8 I became fluent in Tandy's flavor of BASIC, when I was 10 I learned how to use a PC and DOS 3.3 - I was also one of only three kids in the country to have an Extra Class ham license. When I was 12 I did a science project on Ionospheric Radio Wave Propagation which took me to the state science fair, competing against kids who were much older than I was. When I was 13 I learned about Arcnet, Ethernet and TCP/IP communication using KA9Q NOS. By the time I was 16 I was knowledgeable about Novell Netware and worked at an ISP where I coded HTML, Java and PERL. I was exposed to NT 4.0 (at the time - 1996 - it was still in beta), as well as BSDi and Linux in its infancy. The following year I went to work for a local company doing database development and general IT stuff. When my boss left and I finished highschool, I became Director of IT and made more money than both of my parents at the time. I went on to start a consulting company, making no money but learning a ton. After some 5 years of that monotony, I decided it was time to break into IP services. When I was 25 I had a big IP circuit, plenty of IPs, and the opportunity to get into a new kind of pimping. And I'm so glad that I did.

So now is one of those pivotal moments, like when I quit my job to do independent consulting, or when I decided I wanted to sell IP services. The decisions I make now, and the way I make them, will no doubt comprise a major milestone in my life's timeline. I liken it to laying "a cornerstone in Zion" - it will be a good thing to me and anyone else who has the right perspective, but a "stumbling block" and a "rock of offense" to anyone who doesn't. I'm very much looking forward to turning the page. Let's get it!