Marathon

Today is Patriot's day in Boston. Most schools have the day off, and many people go to cheer on the Boston Marathon runners. About 5:00 am the rains and winds from the nor'easter were just pounding down. I couldn't imagine running in these conditions. The weather abated a bit before the race and then was fairly calm by the end of the race.

Inside, I was running a marathon of a different type. My teammates and I sequestered ourselves in a room for a seven hour stretch trying to assemble three 3'x4' posters for a project class. This follows on the heels of a five hour stretch the previous Friday. Our objective is to build a commercialization plan for the "Hunch Engine" from Icosystem. If I had had even the slightest idea how much time this project class would require, I'm not sure I would have enrolled. Life is too busy right now for such a time intensive project. I have a wedding and a honeymoon to plan, summer and longterm housing to find, and three other project classes to finish. I think the poster looks good, and I hope we're through the worst of it. Well, back to work for me.

Announcements

Wedding announcements are one of those things that are under appreciated until you have to do it yourself. I've gotten dozens of announcements, casually glanced them over, and thought "oh, what a cute couple." Now that Cheryl and I have had to create, assemble, stuff, and mail out 350 of them, I have really begun to appreciate what a chore it is. When looking for announcements, it was hard to find ones that we really liked. We found one invitation that we really liked, but calculated that each card cost $12 each. Unbelievable.

Although, at $12/invitation, there must be some really good margins available. I think that makes for a great business opportunity: on-line custom designed cards (think www.dell.com), that are then sourced off-shored and shipped to the customer. Huge margins for the unmet need of quality, personalized, and affordable announcements and invitations.

Anyway, we finally went to a friend, Michelle DeMartini, to have our invitations custom designed. She did an amazing job. Here is her design. The middle black section is the place holder for this picture, which another friend, Diana Hatch, took for us.

The printer, however, was troublesome. Due to an ordering snafu, when we went to pick them up the first time we were told they wouldn't be ready for another 5 days. When we went to pick them up the second time we were told that the order had been confused and that the envelopes weren't printed. We finally got our invitations on our third attempt. Cheryl and I then spent hours gluing 700 photo corners onto the invitations, printing out the envelopes, stuffing them, stamping them and mailing them. I don't know how people managed this process prior to computers.

Luckily though, the invitations are out, and I love the way things turned out. From now on, when I get a wedding announcement, I'll make sure to spend some more time appreciating the effort and time taken to send me one and be more grateful that this person was willing to put in so much effort to keep me included in their special day.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I'm currently finishing my second and last year at Harvard Business School. I used to be a software engineer at Oracle writing Enterprise Resource Planning software, but now I will be heading out to Google to start full time work in June. But before that, Cheryl Stults and I will be married on May 19th, 2007. Find out more on our website www.cherylandwilliam.com.
Life is going to be busy as I finish up school, get married, and head off to start a new life on the West Coast, but I will keep you posted on everything through this blog.