Our Startup Story

Everybody is an Entrepreneur.  Just sit down and ask your family the next gathering what great ideas they have and you’ll collect at least 10.  For most people, the disconnect is in the actual implementation…the follow-through…the actual doing.  Having an entrepreneurial spirit is easy.  Having the guts to actually implement something is hard.

I wrote my first program when I was 9 years old.  The computer was an IBM 286 screaming along at 12 mHz with an entire megabyte of RAM.  I coded up a screensaver in MS-DOS 3.x using the GW-Basic programming language and a manual that came with the computer.  It didn’t do much.  It just flashed my name in random colors over the entire screen.  Somewhere in the midst of that ego-stroking exercise my love for writing software was born.

My first foray into starting a business came a few years later in 8th grade.  My school had just started a Wee Deliver program.  This was a USPS program where your school does a post-office simulation at the school.  Kids can write letters to their classmates and have them delivered the next day.  What most saw as a school-sanctioned way to pass notes, I saw as an opportunity.  I printed out order forms for “Andy’s Candies” and mailed them out to quite a few people in the school.  It wasn’t long before my mail-order candy service was in full swing.  I’d go to the candy store in the mall and stock up on the 10-cent items and turn around and sell them for 25.  It would have worked out great, but unfortunately I didn’t have much willpower and kept eating into my profits…literally.

In highschool, I had a really great teacher for my programming classes.  Tom Deters.  Sophomore year, I learned to code BASIC really well and Junior year I learned PASCAL from him.  He had a very structured approach to each programming assignment where we would take time to plan stuff on paper before sitting down at the computers.  Most of my classmates would sit down at the computers the first day of the two-day assignment and then fill in the planning worksheet later.  I found that if I followed his technique and planned really well, I could get the worksheet done the first day and still finish coding before everybody else on day two.  Even though my development tools have gotten better (whiteboarding, mindmapping, mockups, etc…) the basic techniques have stuck with me.

Now that I knew some PASCAL I partnered with my dad and his Westberg Consulting business to write two computer programs called Phasor Professional and Diplex Professional.  A Phasor is an electronic circuit that sits between an AM Radio transmitter and the radio towers.  It allows a signal to be directionalized.  A Diplexer circuit allows two radio stations to share the same tower.  By selling this software to AM Radio engineers and consultants, it helped pay my way through college.

I busted my hump during college and managed to get out in 3 years.  During this time, I learned C++ Windows development.  I re-wrote both Phasor and Diplex as C++ MFC applications.

After school, I went to work at Caterpillar for 7 years.  I learned Java during this time and was even awarded a patent for one application I wrote.

While still working at Caterpillar, I started a partnership along with my cousin called Midwest Helicam.  We used a large RC helicopter to snap aerial digital photography.  We gave it our best shot, but in the end the idea crashed and burned…literally.  The business plan probably wasn’t very realistic.  We severely under budgeted the amount of maintenance we’d have to do to keep ourselves in the air.  We also overestimated our ability to bring in paying customers without doing much marketing.  The idea was fairly solid, but I think we lacked on the implementation side.  I learned quite a bit about starting and running a business through this endeavor.

I really appreciated the stability that a large company like Caterpillar offered my growing family, but the corporate bureaucracy and red-tape really started to get to me.  I did some job interviews, and turned in my notice thinking I’d take the offer.  I didn’t feel like spending a ton of time writing an elegant resignation so I cheated and used a template from i-resign.com .

As I was finishing out my time at Cat and telling one of our software suppliers that I wouldn’t be able to work with him anymore because I was taking another job, he looked me straight in the eye and said…why didn’t you send me a resume?

The man was Dave Bigelow from Simplified Logic.  He has a soft spot for entrepreneurial type of people and mentoring them to success.  Long story short, we worked it out where I could start my own company, but still have fairly consistent consulting work.

Since starting Swift Mako software, I’ve consulted on a number of Simplified Logic projects as well as new development for Westberg Consulting on a project called WCAP.

I think there is a large number of entrepreneurial type of people out there who love the “startup” phase, but lose interest in seeing things through to the end.  They move on to the next big thing instead of plugging away and doing the difficult and sometimes boring things to make a project or business successful.  I like to push myself to be more than this type of entrepreneur.  I like to be the implementer.  The one who gets things done and sees things through to the end.

What will the future of Swift Mako Software bring?  Not quite sure yet.  I have one idea in the pipeline involving both some embedded hardware device design along with the software to make it work.  We’ll just have to see where the future takes us.