As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.
Building my family and my business in Jasper has taught me so much in my life, and one of those lessons is to always put people first.
Almost any mistake you can make in running a company, I've probably made
I've learned a lot about business from snowboarding: how companies run, how the game works.
Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.
I wish I had known the value of interning at a startup before starting my own. There is so much I could have learned on somebody else's dime in a much lower-risk environment.
There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs.
I often say to entrepreneurs, 'If Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers & Sisters, it wouldn't have gone into bankruptcy.'
