Good news! Matt has received preliminary admission to the University of Washington Law School! If only he were excited about it…
It’s not that he is definitely NOT going. Or that he definitely is. Let me explain: Matt’s initial interest in law school developed from a few different places. On one hand, he believed that he did not have a talent for management or leadership in his current industry. At the same time, he felt he was rapidly approaching the personal satisfaction/earning ceiling as a coder-for-hire. Finally, in recent years he had been choosing his career path in hopes of getting management experience and opportunity, to no avail.
Add to these things his genuine interest in the intersection of law and technology, and law school seems to be a very reasonable, and even exciting, direction.
Then, just days after the law school applications were complete, January happened. Several things happened in January to make law school look remarkably less attractive than it did in December.
- The new year hiring scramble. Since the second week of January, Matt’s received calls and emails from at least one recruiter per week. In addition to spawning this brilliant response, it resulted in Matt taking on two more part-time clients, and renewing his excitement for his field.
- A conversation with Margaret. Margaret was the first employee supervised by Matt during his start-up days at Tomo. It is this experience that taught Matt that he probably wasn’t cut out to be a manager. Margaret’s position was very different, though: “It was a tough job in a young company, and you were far from the worst manager I’ve ever worked with.”
- Startup Weekend. I still do intend to write a good deal more about this, but essentially, Matt’s title for the weekend was “The Glue.” Translation: he was THE go-between for helping the technical and non-technical sides of the business communicate. He did such a fantastic job during the weekend that he was selected to lead the ongoing development of our business as the Chief Technical Officer.
- We got serious. He finally heard me when I said that now seemed like a bad time. My position, many of you have heard, is that five years ago or five years from now this would be fine. Starting law school this year would set him up to experience the most demanding part of his career and his family life at exactly the same time. Not exactly ideal.
Let’s review: Matt’s super excited about our startup. He has a leadership position which he is really rocking. He has many many interesting projects for a wide variety of clients. He likes me a lot.
Um, why spend $100,000 for unknown when known is so good?
