As far as I can recall, I have always been trying to build something.

In high school it was a community magazine. In college it was a BBS (bulletin board system).. Then towards the mid/end of the 90’s it was a subscription based web publication system and an online food court.

Let’s just say it was the wrong county and maybe the wrong time.

But moving forward came the idea of an online community that connected people, services and things based on geolocation…. This is before twitter, facebook, myspace, groupon, etc, etc.

Re-evaluating all my projects; I had realized that it was the “lone-star”ness that should be blamed for the failures.

I decided all my projects eventually failed because I was doing everything and eventually burning out and loosing interest on my own project.

August/September 2009 I decided I was going to have a team for my next venture. Started looking at startup job postings, contacting startups, etc… Wasn’t going anywhere until on twitter I found a post from Fan, looking for a techie to help with blanklabel.com and I reached out as in the early 2000’s another idea I had toyed with was online tailoring…. A year+ blanklabel.com grows, at a rate that far exceeds the expectations of our followers and probably our competition.

At home, many times I use to find an abandoned coffee cup; forgotten, unfinished and left in place. Credit goes to the now wife… I would ask her “what the hell is this?” and her response would be “a chemistry experiment”.., hence my motivation for making the following analogy…

A team is like the tube in a particle reactor and the particles are the team members.., you could state it’s an experiment where the tube contains the particles and helps them move towards the desired direction. Why is it an experiment? Well, you hope that the constant colliding will produce the energy/effect desired and not blow up the entire reactor. So it’s also important that these particles mix well.

Without this tube and other particles, I’d still be a free radical… A lone star that would eventually burn out and have no potential of creating and being part of a “big bang”.