I’m making the decision now before thinking about it wastes any more of my time. Indecision and anxiety takes a huge mental toll on me — it always has. I prefer to be sure about the future and have as little on my mind as possible. That drives many of the decisions I make, and my passion for automating my business. Given the revenues flowing through this year, I don’t feel like I’m stretching calling it a business anymore. Awio Web Services LLC is not a hobby. And that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to work for Microsoft after I graduate. I know I have family and friends reading this that might disagree with that decision, so I’ll explain my reasons more fully.

The job isn’t anything to be excited about. I just had Steve Ballmer pitch staying full time to a group of interns including myself on Wednesday. All of the talk of being a unique company that can do this and that other companies can’t do doesn’t change what my job would be if I came back. I’d still be working in this team with a bunch of developers that have already settled down with families, on an application that will never be seen by anyone I know. My team is in IT instead of a “product group” since what we write is only used internally — by a couple thousand sales reps when servicing enterprise clients. In three months I had already reached the peak of the position — thanks to developers being constantly pulled to work on production issues with the last version of our software, I was the only one working on the next version. That resulted in it being a solo project, which I demoed to “the business”, the decision makers a couple levels above the developers. Now my name is known outside the group, I get all kinds of praise, and the demo ended up in Microsoft’s biggest conference for the sales side, with about 13,000 attendees in Florida last week. Yet that doesn’t change my life at all. With time pressure for the conference off, I’m back to scrolling down lists of bugs to fix in the production version, just like I did at DuPont. The most innovation I can bring as a new member in the team is, perhaps, prettying up some ugly windows in the next iteration.

I won’t have trouble finding a good job if I want one after turning this down. We’re in the middle of the best job market since 2001 for tech jobs, and everyone’s forecasting it’ll only get better. For every two baby boomers retiring this year, only one college student is graduating to replace them. Thanks to my time at Microsoft and all the other jobs I’ve taken to fulfill the coop requirements for my degree from Drexel, I’ll have a great resume. Starting a business on $13 and building it to pay better than Microsoft pays me in 4 years can’t hurt either, but I’ve yet to mention my side job in an interview. Google’s the only company I wanted a job with that has turned me down – not a bad track record.

Microsoft is on the wrong side of the country. There are lots of jobs in Washington and California, but there are lots on the east coast too. I miss being able to visit family whenever I want. I could drive from New York, but visiting from Washington means a 6 hour flight. Living out here isn’t cheap either, and I can’t find a cheesesteak anywhere.

I don’t need a job right now. While I still haven’t “found” all of the money Quickbooks says I’ve earned this year, and fraud is still cutting huge chunks out of that, I’m not doing bad at all. I don’t live like a college student anymore — I haven’t been taking loans for the last two years of the degree. I pay tuition (which is ridicilous – $25,000 a year now), rent, utilities, gas, food, insurance, and everything else I’ll be paying to live after I graduate. And my savings grows, at a higher rate than what I make from the job, and faster than what I’d need to make payments on the loans I do have. And I have a few tricks up my sleeve to permanently increase income overnight without developing any new products or services. The cost is some management complexity, so I’m saving those for fall after I’m back in school.

Finally, it doesn’t fit the plan. I’ve not even talked with anyone in my family about it, but there’s been a plan for a long time. A plan for my life — reaching out just far enough to guide me without going so far as to try to predict the future. I’d say it arose towards the end of high school, when I started getting so anxious about AP tests and college applications that I was having panic attacks. I think that happened, in part, because I wasn’t sure where I was going, and I can’t handle being unsure about big decisions. I decided a couple things that took away any reason to worry:

• I will make money online without working for anyone. I had always made enough to pay for whatever I wanted to buy, even before high school, selling advertising on Website Goodies and the e-mail newsletter Site Builder News. I wasn’t self-supporting by any means, but I was willing to bet on myself. I thought I could make much more with what I’d learned spending so much time online.
• I don’t need to graduate from an ivy league school to work for myself. If a full time job is just the backup plan, I don’t need to worry so much about what colleges accept me. Anyone with a good CS program that offers a good financial aid package will do.
• Even if I’m not able to make enough to support myself online, the experience will help me get a job. I’ll learn more about both business and web development. If I take it seriously, I can use my own company on my resume and in interviews.
• I love school, so stay there as long as possible. Student loans and classes are both a means and an excuse to try building a business before I’m supposed to go out and get a “real” job. The percentage of people getting bachelors degrees goes up every year, so if I want that backup job to be a good one, I’ll need to go to grad school and get a masters anyway. That should give me at least 6-7 years to follow the plan or fail and adjust.

So, I followed the plan. Drexel U. has a good CS program and offered the best financial aid package. The coop program was a bonus I didn’t fully realize the value of until after I accepted – the experience working at other companies doesn’t actually help me run my own business any better, but it does prove I know I’m studying the right thing, I’m competing the right way, and the fall-back plan of getting a job will be very easy with a full resume.

In my freshman year, I started the business. I ramped up on my main sites, and advertising dollars increased, but still not even enough to pay rent on a studio apartment. Then I saw an opportunity – I ran into a product I knew would sell, with almost infinite demand, and could be automated to a high degree. I talked to people, did some investigating, and found some suppliers. I spent $13 to create targetedvisitors.info and tested selling for free on message boards. The demand was definitely there, and while that’s no longer my primary site, and I no longer have the same suppliers, it’s the core of the business I created. I formed the LLC in 2004 to make things a bit more official, and have worked on growing ever since. There’s still lots of room to grow that part, I have new services becoming increasingly profitable, and a notebook of ideas I dare not talk about until I’m back on the other coast.

The plan’s working, and the plan’s what I want for myself, so there’s no reason to abandon it. That means what I should do next is study up for the GRE so I can get my masters degree, not take a job that sidetracks me from that. If I falter somewhere, I have so many places to fall back on. Even before taking a job, there’s no reason I can’t do freelance work. There’s plenty of it out there for developers.

Technically, there’s one path that would both follow the plan and have me working at Microsoft. If I could get explicit permission to keep working on all this while working for them, I’d have both sources of income. I could get a masters degree taking night classes at University of Washington in Seattle. But this would never work for me. I wouldn’t be able to take the burden I’d place on myself worrying about the employment contract. Not being able to develop new products and services which compete with Microsoft pretty much means not developing anything new at all, just continuing to run the same old sites. It’s too big a company, and any time I had an idea, I’d be worrying about whether they’ll swoop in and claim it as their own thanks to some competing project I’m not even aware of. The more successful a project of my own got, or the more I invested into it, the more I’d worry about losing it.

So I’ll be coming back to the east coast in fall, and if things go according to plan, staying there for a while more.