Seven Years of Business : 3nW Corporation

Props to Agent K

I just dropped Karsten Gerhardt off for his connecting rail to LAX. Karsten, one of the principals for 3si2 Corporation, is heading out on a client business tour of Europe. Back in the day, I called him K even before that Tommy Lee Jones character from Men In Black. K laughs a lot more than Jones’ character so it’s not exactly a fair comparison.

K reminded me that he’s never looked back at the salaried employee world or drawn a W2 since our launch back in 2001.

Memories of Startups

Karsten, Jim Nesbitt, and I started 3nW Corporation after NVTL’s dotbomb layoff cycle back seven years ago. The corporation’s founding date is April 20, a homage for Jim’s great Ultimate Frisbee counterculture sense of humor. You’d never think he used to work at the Pentagon for the Chief of Naval Operations.

K was the NVTL eCommerce guy, Jim was killer in NVTL’s Tech Support and pretty handy with HTML, and I came out of the NVTL Applications Engineering department. Also, I brought a deal with me and stepped up with the first potential field engineering contract. That didn’t take so we fell back to the wireless data consulting and positioned to market scientists and engineering skills to the open market. That was for CTIA 2001.

After our launch of 3nW Corporation as a wireless data consulting firm cratered because of very bad luck on 9/11, we were soon relying on individual fallback plans.

Exiled…

A few months later I went back to the trade of being a data plumber, as I called Technical Support, starting with eHelp in January 2002. No more globetrotting and stand-up training, no more great Vancouver BC seafood dinners with clients, nope, it was back to the trenches. 

Back in 2002 and 2003 while I worked at eHelp Corporation by day, and by night I was identifying the next Disruptive Technologies to work into our comeback strategy.

One we looked at was search engine technology. That one was Karsten’s contribution.

Search. I said it first…

Right before Google came up with their desktop search, we pitched it to them. Or at least, our sleazy sales guy pitched it to their lower tier less-than visionary acquisitions team. This was when their Google search appliance in a box style servers were selling for $25k a pop and flying out the doors.

While the desktop search was designed as a small demo, we also had a killer search server tool that did cartwheels with multiple byte character sets for languages.

Nobody understood the value proposition.

Karsten and Don Addiss, our former Vice President at Novatel Wireless, spun off into 3si2 and became a leading design firm with super tight coding while I kept on track with my other research.

They still offer the search engine.

Along with a lot of other very cool services to clients like the LA Clippers and Boeing.

Back to the drawing board | Research

I know people say that Flare has a steep learning curve but those first ninety days using RoboHelp I needed something to make my passion.

I was focused on Energy, Internet Communication Technology (ICT), and beginning in 2004, Agriculture as emerging sectors. Hey, those sites are still up there on 3nW - not updated for years. Go check them out, use the Wayback Machine.

I prettied up a lot of different content I was researching from the NREL and the United Nations and got used to RoboHelp’s myriad uses so I could support them.

My time at eHelp opened my eyes to a lot of Market Disruption in how corporations could do on-demand training and save thousands. ICT was and still is hot. eLearning is the best thing that could have come out of the ICT focus, and distributing education (for free) across the planet - well, while being a bit anti-capitalist, it’s one of the greatest achievements I’ve ever heard of.

What’s in store? To be continued…