Re: The Joy of *small* business

On Sun, 15 Dec 2024, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2024-12-14, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Did you grow it into a big business? How did the experience change from
the start to where you are now?

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On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, Lars Poulsen wrote:

Growing big was never a goal.
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[...]
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From the beginning, the goal was to do something that would fill our
days and feed our families. We have mostly stayed at a headcount of 4.
My tagline is "4 guys in a garage".
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5 years ago or so, we looked at the feasibility of "cashing out", but
realized that the value of the company is the knowledge base of the two
of us, so we are stuck with each other until we wind it up, which we he
started to do. We have offered a "last time buy" to our major customers,
and expect to be done in two years or so.

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In retrospect, my company is very much like one of my first jobs in
Copenhagen. Two sales engineers had started a boutique shop for custom
interfacing. Importing some lab equipment and building custom interfaces
for PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems. 4 people in a 3rd-floor apartment in the
City.
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I have worked for companies of varying sizes, but always been more
satisfied in small groups.
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I wonder, given the draconian laws within IT today, if it would be possible to start a company that builds its own hardware interfaces to something?
A small part of my business is actually a home delivered "software interface" to an extremely bad government web site, that is essential to some of my customers. So instead of them having to spend several hours per month on that horrible site, they use our software to do their task in about 3 minutes instead. Everyone happy!
The fun part is that actually the government did think about the option to do what we did, but their experts came to the conclusion that it was impossible.
So we make the impossible possible! ;)