Yesterday didn't suck!

Today’s National Entrepreneur’s Day and I couldn’t be more thankful.

When I was really young, I filled my time by starting a lending library and a rock museum. For my 5th birthday, my parents gave me a briefcase and a box of “Entrepreneur” business cards.

Regardless of what I’ve been doing, I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart.

It’s been 17 years since I closed the chapter on my first true start-up LazyCampus, an aspiring network of local portals for individual college communities. I often joke that I missed inventing Facebook by one bullet on one slide. The problem was, that bullet was the core of Facebook, the freshman face mag. Regardless, my timing was off and I’m sure I made some mistakes. Lean Startup wasn’t a thing then and I was definitely of the mindset of “Built to Last”.

Over that year from mid-1999 to mid-2000, I learned more about myself and business from my mistakes and failures than at any other time in my career. It certainly was a wild ride and I’m thankful to everyone who believed in me and who supported LazyCampus.

When I joined the Coca-Cola Company, I only expected to be there for six months. Six months quickly turned into eight incredible years. I’d been given the opportunity to travel around the world, spend a year living in Rio, the marvelous city, work on some of the world’s most amazing brands with the world’s most incredible agencies and partners. I was fortunate for most of my time there that I had leadership and mentors that allowed me to at times feel like an entrepreneur. If I hadn’t been afforded those opportunities, it’s unlikely I would’ve stayed as long as I did.

Now as I open a new chapter with BoxLock, the highs are higher and the lows are lower. It’s taken me a long time to be so passionate about a problem that I was willing to push my corporate career aside to focus full-time on a solution. Today, the stakes are much more significant, much more meaningful and much more real. It’s no longer just me. I now have a mortgage, car payments, an incredibly supportive wife and an amazing infant son.

To all of my family, my friends, to my investors and to BoxLock’s backers on Kickstarter, thank you for believing in us. We won’t let you down!

To those who are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur… I've always said to myself, what I’m doing today is cooler than what I did yesterday and what I did yesterday didn’t suck!… If you can’t say the same, you may want to take a step back and take a closer look at what you’re doing.

To all of the other entrepreneurs out there, happy entrepreneur’s day, you’re pushing the world further faster and solving our most important challenges. Keep hustling.