Ever have one of those unexpected flashbacks to a bad memory, so visceral that it gives you chills?
I just had one of those moments at the cab stand at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose Airport. In an instant I was transported back to March 19, 2007. I had scraped together the last fragment of credit our business had to fly to California for the Kelsey Drilling Down on Local Conference. I had used that excuse of proximity to bulldoze my way into some meetings with VC’s with whom I’d had promising phone conversations, but who couldn’t get too excited over a Texas start-up whose founder wasn’t standing in their office.
I got on the plane that day resolved that if I didn’t come back with at least five promising investment leads, I was going to shut the thing down and walk away. Four months past the launch of our flagship product, we were broke. Our angel investors had probably gone as far as they could. We were going to miss payroll from here forward. I spent equal time on the plane honing my pitch and making a shortlist of companies that might hire me the next week.
As I walked to the cabstand, where there was a considerable line, I turned my cellphone back on. Before I could even check for messages, it started ringing incessantly:
