With the economy in shambles and the outlook for the next couple years looking pretty bleak, is now a good time to leave your safe job to start something of your own?

It depends.

VCs and angel investors are telling their portfolio companies to batten down the hatches and prepare for the worst, which doesn’t bode well. Money is going to be very tight and every company out there is going to have to do some serious belt-tightening. Getting investment is going to be even tougher. Exits are going to be extremely difficult and rare for awhile. We’re going to see layoffs, consolidation, and lots of bankruptcies as companies are not able to raise the cash they need to grow or sustain operations. It’s going to be very ugly.

That being said, downturns can be a great time to start a company, depending on the type of company you want to start. If you want to start something that’s focused on getting lots of eyeballs on the back of millions in venture funding, with little thought of profitability, now might not be the best time. On the other hand, if you’re starting something that truly adds value, has a clear revenue model, and helps individuals or companies be more efficient, then perhaps now is a great time. The key is going to be keeping things lean and understanding that the odds of a fast exit for untold millions just got a lot slimmer.

One practical note: throw a touch of realism into your plans. If you’ve got a great job with good benefits and no savings, now might not be the best time, especially if you have a family to support. Take the next six to twelve months, build up some reserves, build your company on the side, and then strike out on your own if it’s working. It’s very, very difficult to build a startup on the side (I speak from experience), but you don’t want to get into a situation where you quit, it doesn’t work out, and you’re homeless because you didn’t have a safety net and there are no jobs available. Think ahead and think defensively.

Tighten your belt, put your head down, and just keep trudging towards the goal of adding value at maximum efficiency. It’ll pay off eventually.

The last week has been a rough one. I’ve been very busy juggling client work and working feverishly to get BlueSwarm.com out the door. We’re very close and I hope to be posting about that any day now. Anyway, my daily habits fell apart sometime around last Wednesday and I’ve been fighting to catch up on things and get back into the swing of it since then. I realized today that a third of September is now gone, and I can feel the weight of my 30-day goals pressing in on me. I think I’m going to hit most of them, but there’s one or two that are going to be a real stretch.

Sometimes I feel like I can never get ahead, but I have to remember that perfection is NOT the goal, progress is. If I set perfection up as the ultimate aim, I tend to wait until things are perfect, but they never are.

So I’m jumping back into things today, even though it’s already past 5pm and I’m swamped and the easy thing to do would be to tell myself that I’ll get a fresh start tomorrow. The problem is that tomorrow turns into next week and next month and next year and never. Today is all that matters.

And please, If you see me on Twitter, ask me how my daily habits and goals are going

I started on a new theme for my blog months ago, but with client work and entrepreneurial pursuits and my trip to Asia, things just kept getting pushed back.  I finally spent some time to finish things up to the point that I’m ready to put it online, though everything isn’t completely done yet.  I would love some feedback, specifically around the points below:

• Do you like the design overall?
• Do you see any issues in your browser? (if so, what browser and OS?)
• Is the navigation confusing at all?
• Is there anything obvious missing?
• Are the fonts readable?

In case anyone is interested, this is a 100% from scratch WordPress 2.5 theme based on a design that my good friend Ben Lew whipped up for me almost six months ago.  So far, the plugins I’m running are just Akismet, Feedburner, and SearchEverything (to filter out pages and certain categories from search results).  The flash image slideshow is SlideShowPro with a custom script that pulls images from a set in my Flickr account.  If anyone is interested in the overall setup of the taxonomy, pages, etc, I’ll be glad to detail it all in another post.

If I had to do it again, I would use Drupal, primarily due to the better taxonomy control.  But Wordpress has worked out well and I’m excited to see things grow.  I still have a fair bit of content to get in here, especially projects.  Other things I plan on adding in the future are a specific page layout for projects, as well as leveraging tags on both posts and projects.  One other thing I would like to add is a place to list pages that fall under one of the five major areas of the site (Blogger, Consultant, etc).  Any ideas?

Anyway, I’m glad it’s finally done and I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Thanks!

UPDATE: I’m getting reports from some users who are seeing just a big empty grey box in the header area of the site, instead of the photos that should be appearing.  If you see this, please leave a comment and let me know what browser / OS you’re running and what version of Flash you have installed (if you know).  Thanks!

One of my clients launched HowYouEco.com today, which actually includes a suite of sites (HomeEco.com, WorkEco.com, PlayEco.com) and is directory project that helps people keep track of everything going on in the green movement. I got involved late in this project and mainly helped wrap up some loose ends and clean things up a bit. The site is pretty simple now, but they have some very cool plans for the future. Please take a look and let them know what you think!

Projects launched in May 2008: 1 (1 client, 0 personal)

I know a splash page isn’t much to get excited about, but I feel I owe readers an apology and some visual relief after posting a link to the previous version of Star’s site, so here’s our splash page. Our new site will be up soon…

http://www.StarSF.com

About a year ago, I started blogging in earnest about personal finance and investment, as well as the occasional post on personal development.  In April 2007, I started a series about investing for young adults, which took me a bit longer to complete than originally planned (6 months vs. 1 month).  During the process of writing that series, I got the idea for a site dedicated to helping young adults succeed, covering topics like personal finance, career development, etc.  I got so excited that I turned the project into a huge mountain of an idea and got discouraged.  I have since decided that I need to start somewhere, so I’m going to go ahead and just give it a try.  Hence, Bounteo.com is now live as a simple blog (for now).  I’ll be moving a lot of my personal finance and investing posts (including the series) over to Bounteo.  Please check it out or subscribe to the feed.  Also, I would love any suggestions on how to make the site better, post topics, etc.  Thanks!

PS - The name comes from the word “bounteous”, just in case you were wondering.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
British soldier (1888 - 1935)

I’ve posted this quote before, but it’s especially appropriate for recent developments in my life. I haven’t posted to my blog in the last 3 months, and so much has changed since then. Let me give you the highlights:

This Blog
I’ve received lots of notes from people asking if I’m going to finish the investing series I started. I owe my readers an apology. I’ve just been swamped with a bunch of other things, some of which you’ll read about below. I wanted to let people know that not only will I be finishing this series, but I’ll be launching a new project in the next few weeks that the readers of this blog will hopefully find very interesting. It’ll live on a new site of its own and I’ll be releasing details within the next couple weeks, hopefully, so stay tuned. I know you’re probably thinking that I’ll flake on this as well, but the good news is that my time has opened up some. For more, read on…

CNET Networks
As I’ve mentioned before, my day job is an Associate Product Manager at CNET Networks, one of the largest web companies in terms of traffic. I started at CNET in August of 2006 and I’ve really learned a lot there and made some great friends. However, about three weeks ago I started looking around for some contract work, primarily through craigslist.org. After about a week, it was apparent that not only was there enough work for several full-time jobs, I could make 2-3 times as much doing freelance work as I was making at CNET. I managed to hang on for a few more days before I decided that going freelance full-time was the right move and I gave my notice at CNET. My last day was Friday and I am now completely free. I have punched my last clock and done my last 9-5. From where I’m sitting right now, I have a hard time imagining any circumstances under which I would be an employee again, but I’m always open to discussion :-). I already have more than enough work coming my way to stay busy and I now have the flexibility to be able to work from anywhere in the world, at any time that I choose. I’m sitting in a 24-hour starbucks in San Francisco writing this at about 12:30am and it’s comforting to know that I don’t have to get up in the morning unless I want to.

I will say that CNET was an awesome opportunity for me. They gave me a shot when I needed it most and it was a fantastic place to cut my teeth in the web field. I met a lot of very passionate and talented people who inspired me greatly. They offered me a great job before I left, but ultimately, I’m just not an employee. I came to the Bay Area to start a company, not work at one. I don’t want people to think that I’m saying that there’s anything wrong with being an employee or that I didn’t enjoy it. I am fortunate in that I have skills that are in such high demand that I can pay the bills with part-time freelance work and have a lot of time left to focus on projects of my own, some of which I’ll talk about below.

Oh, and my wife quit her job the same day. She’s been working towards it for a lot longer than I have and now we’re both unfettered freelancers, free to travel the world, set our own rules, and take the road less traveled.

BlueSwarm.org
For the last six months or so, I’ve been hard at work with two brilliant and talented partners on a project called BlueSwarm.org. It’s a social network aggregator / lifestreaming / friendstreaming service, which are all fancy ways of saying that it helps you easily keep track of what your friends are doing all over the web and vice versa. Very cool stuff. We launched a private beta of the site on July 7th and have been steadily working on improvements since. Please check it out and request an invite…we hope to be giving out a bunch in the next couple weeks.

Real Estate
As I noted in a post earlier this year, I purchased a single family home with a partner and rehabbed it. We had it on the market for about six months before I finally decided that I’d rather keep it than drop the price any further. I negotiated an agreement to buy out my partner and I now own my 2nd long-term rental property.

Last Wednesday, I was forwarded an email about a sweet little 3/2 condo and managed to put it under contract at a great price within the next 24 hours. The best part is that about 75% of the purchase price is covered by an assumable private note at 6% fixed (!) and the current seller agreed to carry another 15% of the purchase price at 7.5% fixed, leaving me with just 10% to put down and no banks or mortgage companies to hassle with. If you can find a private lender at a good rate, I highly recommend it. We can close any time that works for us, so hopefully in the next couple weeks, I’ll own my third property. The empire grows…

I think that’s pretty much it…I’m also getting my pilot’s license and learning to sail, but so far those haven’t been too time-consuming

In closing, I would just like to say that I’m overwhelmed by how richly God has blessed my life in just about every way. I’ll be 25 years old in less than a month and the world is stretched out in front of me, filled with endless opportunity. I say this not to brag, but to encourage others to take the road less traveled, to take risks, to discover and follow their passions. I won’t say that it hasn’t been hard at times and sometimes it’s completely overwhelming to have a seemingly endless array of options available, but overall, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Once you taste the freedom, you won’t either.