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Education & Experience

When I founded Banner Blue, I did not have any experience running a business, but I had something equally important — a love of building and creating.

Fundamentally, company survival and growth are a function of product creation. No products, no sales, no company. Personally, I created and built hundreds of things before founding Banner Blue, I was responsible for shipping 225 products during my years at Banner Blue, and with a little luck, I will build hundreds of things during the balance of my life.

When I was growing up, I remember occasionally being concerned because my dad was not like the fathers on television. He did not teach me how to play baseball or take me to ball games. Instead, my dad was always building something and showing me how he did it. I soon realized that he was simply teaching me about what my genes programmed me to enjoy. While others might see building something as an arduous task, I have avocations just to restore my energy so I can go back to building and creating.

Additionally, Banner Blue's products utilized sophisticated and rapidly changing technology with which I was both comfortable and familiar. I loved science as a child, studied science and engineering in college, and worked exclusively for high-technology companies before founding Banner Blue. In fact, one of my avocations is to read about scientific and technical advancements.

I say these things not to brag, but to demonstrate that I truly enjoy the things that helped me build a better product and allowed me to relate to the engineers I employed. The founder does not need personal expertise in every area of importance to his venture, but he should cover a good portion of the ground. In a technology-driven business, I believe it is imperative for the founder or the chief executive officer to understand technology at a deep and fundamental level. If a non-technical leader turns over technology leadership to a subordinate technologist, the risk is that the resulting technology vision ignores business reality. On the other hand, if a non-technical leader formulates the technology vision himself with only the advice of the technologist, he risks losing the technical subtleties and bad decisions result.

It is also my strong belief that there is no substitute for deep, relevant experience. In any human endeavor, the expert knows things without even realizing it. Sometimes we call it intuition. The person who has extensive, relevant experience has a competitive advantage over the person who does not, because all else being equal, the person with relevant experience will simply make better decisions. That is all there is to it; nothing more, nothing less.

My business education was also valuable. The Master of Business Administration program at Harvard rounded out my understanding of business, accelerating the day when I felt ready to strike out on my own. However, I do not consider an MBA indispensable by any means and I routinely tell people that many jobs provide a similar overview of business. It would probably be better for more young professionals to go back to school for a technical degree rather than an MBA.

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