It’s been really interesting to work on an entrepreneurial project within an existing firm.

In a lot of ways it’s great. From day one you already have a fax machine, an established brand, and a pay check. You get to skip all the mundane work of actually setting up a new business entity. You have whole departments at your disposal to do your bidding. It feels so good to just send something to the marketing department and tell them to make a press release for it and send it out.  And getting an actual paycheck in the first months of a new venture is an uncommon luxury for entrepreneurs. (although it’s at the expense of equity)

Entrepreneurship within a firm isn’t a new idea, but it’s often overlooked. Macintosh started as an entrepreneurial side project at Apple and ended up becoming their main product line. Post-it’s started as an independent project at 3M that employees worked on on their own time.

I feel like right now, with the economy being what it is and all, a lot of firms with too many idle employees could really benefit by putting some of them on entrepreneurial projects.  They could be developing new projects or divisions, doing consulting or training for partner firms, figuring out how to make or do something internally that the firm used to have to buy, etc.

In a lot of ways though I miss the wild-west style of doing a real standalone startup. I find that I do a lot better work at 2 in the morning than at 8 in the morning, and I don’t think wearing a suit makes my work particularly better either. And I’m also having to get used to the idea of working on a project, emailing it off to the boss, and never hearing of any feedback or results.

The funniest part of it, which I’m completely unaccustomed to, is the dilbertesque world of office politics, inefficiencies, and paradoxes.

Some departments just don’t get along with other departments. We have an IT department who’s primary task, as far as I can tell, is figuring out which websites employees are using to goof off, and blocking them. But they block sites in a very absurd way, they block all web addresses that contain certain strings of 3 letters. For a while we couldn’t use our google spreadsheets because they had blocked the letters “ads”. (spreadsheet)

Today one of us was goofing off, and he discovered that the letters “imo” were blocked when someone’s facebook profile wouldn’t load (someone with a long silly russian name that had “imo” in it).

Probably there is some sort of Vietnamese social networking site or chat client that has “imo” somewhere in the name, perhaps a site for sharing opinions, who knows. I don’t, because I can’t load the url.

I’ve made it a minor personal quest to go yell at the IT department whenever they block websites or disable some functionality on my computer. I got my google chat functionality back by showing them that the google powered search on a Vietnamese news website had been disabled by their shennanigans. Once one of my partners had to get management approval to use his USB thumb drive.

So I sat and sat, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any important business words that had “imo” in them. Eskimo? I needed a good reason to go mess with IT.

I tried to search online for words that contained imo, but of course my searches got blocked. So I enlisted my friends on google chat to help me out (previous victory paying off!). I found this site that lets you search for a piece of a word: http://www.onelook.com/?w=*imo*&scwo=1&sswo=1&scwo=0&sswo=0 and my girlfriend was nice enough to load it on her computer and email me the results.

Unfortunately none of these words could be reasonably related to any of my work online. I guess I might have been able to argue that I needed to search for “Vietnam antimonopoly law”, but that’s a stretch, and antimonopoly isn’t really a word.

although this part of the list does make a cool word pyramid:

135. limous
136. limousin
137. limousine
138. limousines
139. longanimous
140. magnanimous
141. magnanimously
142. magnanimousness

check that out.

Next I tried to search for Vietnamese business news that contains the letters imo by clicking through archives and doing a page search in my browser. I found this article http://www.vnbusinessnews.com/2009/01/vietnamese-kimonos-win-japanese-hearts.html which I guess must be about kimonos that are being manufactured in Vietnam and sold in Japan. Still, not very important.

So I don’t have a good reason to go yell at IT today. They win this round. Bastards.

I wonder if I were at a real startup if I would have actually been working on my work during that time instead of trying to thwart my rivals in the next room.

I can’t blame it on the suit because today was dress down friday, woo! office life!