As far as I can remember there has always been an entrepreneurial side to me. Let me share with you my entrepreneurial evolution.

I can remember back in middle school when I was be selling lollipops that I got from trick or treating. I saw that there was a demand for something that I could capitalize off of for a small profit. In high school I was at a track meet down in New York City and found a high demand for candy bars, and I decided to try it out at track meet myself selling water and candy I bought at BJ’s Wholesale club. I broke even that day but learned a valuable lesson when most my candy melted on a fairly warm spring day. My freshmen year in college I try to run a college basketball pool where I lost some money when rules were not specific enough on choosing a winner and there was a tie. Those were some of the petty things I did when I was younger.

I did go to college and graduated from SUNY Albany in 2004 with a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration, Concentration in Finance. Still in college on the way home from a weekend full of sports, I still have a vivid memory talking with my current business partner Adam McFarland about doing more than just getting a job after I finish school. We both ended up starting our own businesses and became co-founders of Pure Adapt.

Before I started my first business and right before I was about to graduate from college, I had written up a business plan for a coffee shop kind of place. I did some research, wrote a business plan and asked my Dad to finance it, but he didn’t think I had the necessary experience. At the time I thought it was worth a shot because I was about to graduate college, but that idea never came to fruition.

During my final semester of college, I had already been working full time as a manager of Verizon Wireless retailer, which would lead me to my first real business. Just a note, it definitely wasn’t fun working full time and going to school full time, but it’s all good I learned a lot as a manager there. Around fall 2004 I really started to lose interest in my job. Then I started to read books on starting my own business and reading up on sites like Entrepreneur.com, which finally lead me to quit my job and start WirelessMogul.com.

WirelessMogul.com was a mobile phone accessory e-commerce store that I started. WirelessMogul.com was something that I could finance myself and use the knowledge I already had from working with mobile phones. Since it was an e-commerce store I needed to learn about selling on the internet and some programming. In my mind I can’t say that WirelessMogul.com was successful but was the beginning of many valuable learning experiences. I ended up changing strategies many times because I started to lose too much money. Things like pay per click, my monthly merchant cost and transactions cost were adding up. I ended up cutting cost to the point where I only paid for the domain name and hosting. It ended up becoming just a site full of affiliates, I still have bunch of left over inventory and then it was shut down.

My next venture was to create a Chinese restaurant directory and do web design for Chinese restaurants. This meant that I would have to increase my web design and programming skills. I read programming and web design books to get myself up par to design my new site. I launched ChineseFoodAmerica.com in May 2006. I was able to create the online Chinese restaurant directory with an interactive map using Yahoo Maps API. One key thing I took from WirelessMogul.com is to keep cost low. I was able to keep cost low, but I ran into some major obstacles selling web design to Chinese restaurants. Some major obstacles included the culture and language barriers. My dad works for a Chinese restaurant and he wasn’t sold on getting web site from me, the culture is just very old school. Anyways this new business wasn’t burning through money. The development of ChineseFoodAmerica.com was a major stepping stone to where I am now as a programmer and web designer.

Next I would be a co-founder of Pure Adapt, doing programming and web design. Stayed tuned for Part 2, where I get more into me and Pure Adapt.

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