Why I Quit My Job to Found a Company

(… And Meet Spark Labs)

No, I am not kidding.

Yes, I left my role at Equinix a few weeks ago to found my own strategic consulting firm. It’s called Spark Labs and we launch today!

No, it wasn’t about Equinix. The folks there are great and I only see amazing things coming from that company for the foreseeable future.

Yes, I took the leap… to follow my passion and dreams to found and lead a start-up, but also to meet the needs of a market that has yet to fully be addressed. Spark Labs is a consulting firm that fills this gap: we helps companies to create, ideate and innovate in new ways that grow their business and strategic value in the market. You can read more about this here.

In working with large enterprise vendors, customers, start-ups and clients for almost twenty years now, I’ve observed the following common challenges:

(1) The definition of innovation has shifted from being one of new products, services and solutions to one of new business and competitive models, supply chain models, partner and platform ecosystem models and the like.

(2) Innovation is more than just creation. It’s also the development model that you use to build whatever that innovation may be – from new services and monetization models to open sourcing a product or enabling new customer/user ecosystems.

(3) Innovation is only successful when approached head-on, fast, and the “fail and fail fast to succeed” model is utilized. You have to accept some initial failure (the right kind) to see your successes and opportunities.

(4) Innovation means change. Change means the impact is felt at personal levels. This is why you frequently see the resistance to it.

In founding Spark Labs, we spent a lot of time differentiating from what other firms out there do. We defined, refined, rebuilt and mapped out a model of what innovation and success look like across the four different areas we are focusing on: Strategy, Product, Community and Marketing. We’ve run a few advisors and partners through these models and we think (as do they) that it’s pretty darn good. We’re still iterating on it a bit and yes, changes will occur along the way but it’s solid and definitely helps organizations looking to innovate faster – and get over their roadblocks keeping them from getting there. Additionally, we have awesome partners that enable our offerings to go even further (think: create your own personal dream team) – Tim Crawford from AVOA, Arik Hesseldahl from Anchor Ventures, Jennifer Cloer from reTHINKit PR and David Pollak of Lift. Each have great expertise and lots to offer, and Spark Labs is very excited to engage with them.

Now, back to that “start-up” thing. This is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do – but thus far, the most rewarding. I’ve been wearing lots of hats lately – IT admin, office manager, webmaster, marketer, strategist… and of course, CEO and team leader. That said, I go to sleep every night full of ideas and plans on how to help our clients, and wake up more energized than ever before. It’s truly a trip… and I hope it will be an awesome one for Spark Labs.

I think Richard Branson said it best when he said, “At the end, entrepreneurship is not about wearing expensive suits and earning a lot of money. It is all about being true to yourself, to your values in life. To your dreams.”

Let’s see where this adventure takes us?

Now go check out Spark Labs – we’d love to chat!

/LC