Why I started looking at an MBA? (Part 1)

Up to about two years ago I wasn't interested at all in an MBA. That was something academics did for academic purposes, and having become frustrated with the local university system and its non-student-friendly bureaucracy and uninspiring lecturers during my failed run at an M.Sc. Computer Science, it was not a place I was looking to venture to anytime soon.

Working for companies in Trinidad also didn't quite suit me, I might meet a few kindred spirits who liked getting things done, but more often than not the dispassionate culture that seemed to dominate all the larger public and private organisations I worked with would take their toll. Combined with my own lack of training in how to get things done successfully and my own youthful impatience at systems that to me prevented things from getting done rather than empowered folks to get things done, I'd find myself again, several months later, calling my local headhunter in the search for a "perfect" organisation that never existed.

After a time I eventually resigned myself to the fact that if I were to survive in the world as a useful, contributing member of society, I had to find something I could remain stable in. I started developing my company, Redditech, which targeted small growing businesses in Trinidad looking to take advantage of lower-cost open source software solutions.
It combined the best of many worlds I was passionate about. I loved getting things done. I loved being evangelical about computers and technology and finding new niches in which it made things better for everyone. I loved open source software because of the inherent community "spirit" and freedom of ideas surrounding it. At a time when Microsoft and other popular vendors weren't so "open" about sharing versions of their own software freely without a prohibitively expensive licensing cost, this was an excellent startup area for a self-funded fellow like me to be in. Things were good, or at least they were initially.

Then the complications hit. Jobs were inconsistent, I had no idea about developing job pipelines or marketing myself or my company. Sometimes the work was way more than I could handle, and I would come in extremely overdue, and costs would increase. My project management and estimation skills were sorely lacking. Clients would ask for one thing, for which there was one price, and then several weeks down the road, promote several other ideas, expecting them at the same price. I had no working knowledge of what scope creep was at the time, or how to manage it effectively. I had little legal awareness either, so jobs often went on the trust of a handshake, something that left me often coming up short as just dues were renegotiated at the time of payment in a "take it or leave it fashion." In short, I was too inexperienced for the task at hand, and that inexperience was showing after a year or so by the limited funds I had left from when I initially launched into my own business, and the pending bills of the coming months that were nowhere close to being met.

That was about the time I met with three guys from Massachusetts who were recruiting software developers in Trinidad for the near-shore arm of an IT healthcare solutions firm called Medullan. They had no offices in Trinidad, yet. They were still being built, but they had such a grand plan in mind they needed folks to come on board several months before this was completed. Their headquarters were in Medford, a place very far away to a Caribbean soul like me, and initially the first few folks they employed would come there to train directly with them.
There was something about these guys, a connect that happened that was somewhat magical. I had met kindred spirits before, but these guys seemed to possess an insight into how the world worked and how to plan and build for successful results that made me yearn to work with them and learn from them and just frankly build something great together with them.
I came in that morning looking to explore partnership opportunities for my own company, but by the end of that day I had decided without any doubt that my Redditech dreams would now be on hiatus, I was about to start on a new path building a great company-to-be called Medullan.
Read Part Two.