1982-1983

Sapphire Software was my first dalliance into business, at 12. An early indicator of a life's zealous ambition, I considered my 3 years' software experience sufficient to begin. Later in life, Entrepreneur Magazine asked me the most important trait for entrepreneurs, which I still believe:

“A nearly delusional sense of optimism,
even in the face of adversity.”

The product was graphics software, and it ran on the only computer I could afford in 1983: a 5k Commodore VIC-20. For comparison to today's standards, that's over a million times less memory than an iPod Nano, although the price was the same.

Like most software of the day, my program was a tool to assist technically-inclined hobbyists, and its details are too arcane to merit description here. However, the experience of taking the product from “concept-to-shrinkwrap”, and establishing a retail sales channel, was surprisingly similar to the much larger-scale endeavors that later defined my life.