Its been about a month since my last proper post and you may (or may not) have been wondered what has been keeping me busy. Well in short we’ve been trying to crystalize the ideas we had around Face Your Cause into a useful social application with an attractive business model. In doing this, we came to the conclusion that Face Your Cause would operate really well as a social enterprise, and I have now decided to take a back seat on the project in order to investigate new ideas and opportunities.

I feel like a big mistake I made when getting involved with Face Your Cause was jumping at the idea without considering any alternatives. Having been stuck in the application process for graduate jobs at the tail end of last year, I was raring to get involved in a project in January and as a result I jumped on board without too much consideration. Over the last few weeks it became increasingly clear to me that while Face Your Cause is very likely to be a successful venture in the social enterprise and charity domain, it wasn’t appealing enough to make a full time commitment.

It’s impossibly difficult to commit 60 hours a day to a start-up and give it 110% without being passionate about it. At the beginning of this week, before it was too late, I was faced with the difficult task of telling Tom about my concerns. After a few long discussions on Monday and Tuesday, we came to a decision: Tom is going to carry on with Face Your Cause, outsourcing the rest of the development, with my help on the technical side. This leaves me back at square one, with a new team and new ideas.

This time I am working with Dilan Jayawardane, an MIT CompSci graduate who was previously working at Oracle. We’ve just started brainstorming, and our shortlist of potential projects is growing steadily. Hopefully we can come up with a disruptive innovation rather than a pile of chindōgu.

If it all goes belly up, maybe Dilan and I could open a Sri Lankan curry house?

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Hello and welcome to my new blog!

Last week after much debate (with myself), I decided I want to have another go at starting an Internet company. This decision came much to my parents’ horror, who were probably hoping I was done with the whole “I want to be an entrepreneur” phase after I left ClickUni - a start-up which I co-founded along with David Langer and Andy Young while doing my BA at Oxford. Convincing my parents, who after all are putting a roof over my head and keeping me fed and watered that this is the right decision was not easy, but it did help me to convince myself that I had thought things through. To be honest I am still only about 75% sure that this what I want to do, but given my somewhat indecisive nature, I think 25% in any direction is pretty promising!

So what has motivated me to blog about this journey I am about to embark on? Well I wanted to share my personal take on starting a company and making it successful, from coming up with the “killer idea” all the way through to launching the product/service and beyond. From my previous experience with ClickUni I know that there are going to be lots of decisions to make and challenges to face along the way and I’m hoping that by blogging regularly I can share my experiences in a way that will be useful to anyone else on the same path or just entertain those that would have known better! I’m also a strong believer in the old adage “A problem shared is a problem halved” so blogging should help me clarify my problems and find some solutions - with your help of course.

Now, I just need to come up with an idea… While I start thinking, you can enjoy watching this amusing video of Bill Gates on his last day at work which I have included purely because I really wanted to have a video in my first post. You are only truly successful when you are friends with Bono.

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