How to Start a Business

Step 3 It Started with a Phone Call

For years, I had set my sights on an academic career based on the fact that the professors at MIT were some of the happiest and most engaged people I had ever met, and seemed to have very long, active careers (and lives!). Being around energetic smart young people must just rub off on you in some way. While in graduate school, I attended every so-you-want-to-be-a-professor career-type lecture and seminar that was given, and I noted with some apprehension that the professors older than about 40 were all smiles and told stories about being hired that -- almost without exception -- went "so, I was sitting in my graduate student office thinking I might go into consulting after graduation when the department head walked in and offered me a job," while everyone younger looked ill. All the younger folks had applied to dozens of schools, been asked to interview at less than 5, and received only one offer as part of a full-time 18-month long job-search process; many no longer had any hobbies besides drinking.

Not yet dissuaded in the fall of 2003, I was closing in on what were planned to be the final 6 months of my doctoral work in mechanical engineering at MIT. My research was progressing quite nicely, and I felt on target and in control, when I met with one of my mentors and role models. He insisted that I develop a much more extensive model for the nanoparticle-based printing process I had invented and was researching, and pointed out that all the different branches that I wouldn't be able to address and study now would make excellent projects for grant applications and work for when I was "professor Eric."

I had a moment of clarity and realized my project was truly academic in nature, that its primary goal was to teach me and let me practice a research methodology, and my printing process's real-world impact was probably limited. Further, I didn't want to spend the next 18 months competing for an academic position whose availability was based more on an over-abundance of applicants than on my personal merits, and where I would eventually end up yelling at some poor grad student to finish a project faster so I could get tenured.

Basically, I wanted to continue kitesurfing on windy afternoons, and I wanted to actually have some direct impact on the world.

So, I immediately called up Colin, who had just left his previous company, Kovio, and said, "Whatever you're doing next, we're doing it together. Plus, I'm sure we can rope Saul in; he's pretty much in the same boat as me, but is 6 months further out from graduating." A few days later, Saul was involved, and we then recruited Dan.

So, Squid Labs literally started with a single phone call.