The first company I would call a real business started during my time at the University of Arizona, where I studied from 1998 to 2002. Like most of what I have built since, it began with watching someone else do something and believing I could do it better.
A market hiding in the dorms
It is hard to imagine now, but in the late 1990s computers did not come ready for the internet. Desktops and laptops shipped without networking built into the motherboard. To get online you had to install hardware yourself: a PCI Ethernet card in a desktop, or a PCMCIA card in the slot on the side of a laptop. Then you had to register that hardware's MAC address with the university network before you were allowed to connect at all.
Every single student needed to get online, for their coursework and for plenty of social reasons too, and most of them had no idea how to install the hardware or navigate the registration. As a freshman, I watched an older student go dorm to dorm in the first few months of the year installing network cards for a fee. Most people saw a guy with a screwdriver. I saw a business.
Deciding to do it better
I spent my freshman year taking mental notes, and when I came back as a sophomore I decided to launch my own version and run it properly. I found suppliers in China for the Ethernet cords, the PCMCIA laptop cards, and the desktop PCI cards, and I ordered a large batch of inventory before the school year began. That meant putting up my own capital and taking real risk on stock I had not yet sold, which was exactly the point. I wanted margin, and owning the inventory was how to get it.
Building a team and a brand
I did not want to be the one turning every screwdriver, so I hired a team of computer science students to handle installations and paid them a flat ten dollar labor fee per job, even though each install often took thirty to forty five minutes. I gave the company a name, Ethernet Express, so it felt like a real operation rather than a kid with a backpack of parts.
For marketing, I borrowed an idea from the bars around Tucson. They were everywhere handing out small glossy quarter-page flyers, and the flyers clearly worked, because the bars were packed. So I designed flyers for Ethernet Express, ordered ten thousand of them from a local printer, and paid other students to blanket the dorms and hand them out across campus.
Demand exploded
The phone did not stop. Hundreds upon hundreds of calls came in to my personal cell phone, often in the middle of class. The first couple of months of each school year were a sprint. In the first year the business did thirty to forty thousand dollars in revenue, and over the next couple of years I grew it to somewhere between forty and sixty thousand. When I graduated, I handed the company off to a friend a couple of years younger so it could keep running after I left.
The lesson that stuck: controls
The most valuable thing I took away from Ethernet Express was not the revenue. It was a hard lesson about controls, and it came from being stolen from.
One of my older installers began handing me paper invoices, filled out by hand, that showed a customer had bought only a ten dollar Ethernet cord, when I had sent him out expecting a full hundred dollar installation. The numbers kept coming back wrong. Through a process of elimination, and by calling some of the customers directly, I pieced together what was happening. He was in fact installing the full hardware, charging the customer in full, and pocketing the difference while quietly walking off with my inventory.
I tracked him down and confronted him. I never got the money back. But the experience taught me something I have relied on in every company since: a business needs controls. Inventory controls, cash controls, clear processes, and a way to verify that what gets reported actually happened. Those systems are not bureaucracy. They are how you protect what you build.
Every founder learns this lesson eventually. I am grateful I learned mine at nineteen, for a few thousand dollars, rather than much later and for much more.
The revenue was the reward. The theft was the education.