My Startup Journey: CXfriends

I ended yesterday’s story with my joining Sprint.

I spent the next 11 years at Sprint. I learned much and greatly appreciated all that the company had to offer. I am thankful for the experience and the relationships I gained over those 11 years.

In many ways, Sprint was much more innovative and nimble than other 100+ year old telecom companies, but, in the 21st century, it clearly wasn’t a startup. That doesn’t mean that startup thoughts weren’t flowing through my head.

As part of my job there were two related sets of activity that in some way linked Sprint with the startup community.

With Sprint’s permission, in 2005 I wrote an article for Business Reform on “The Law of Mobility”. That led to a blog and speaking engagements and eventually a book, all about how mobility was revolutionizing how we interact with the world around us, and how businesses operate and compete. I know that seems obvious now, but in 2005 it wasn’t. Remember the iPhone wasn’t even announced until 2007.

With the strong support of my boss, my team, and Sprint’s PR group, that thought-leadership landed me on stage at many conferences where the discussion and debate was happening around how this revolution would unfold. I worked hard to position Sprint as the best partner for innovative developers of new products and services that were rushing this revolution forward. One of my favorite catch-phrases (first coined by Brian Huey on my team) was “Innovators want to move at Valley-speed, not carrier-speed.”

It was energizing and fun to be seen as the wireless operator that “got it” and to be welcomed with open arms by the mobile startup community.

But all of this talk would be meaningless if Sprint didn’t live up to what I was saying. There were many people at Sprint who embraced this enabling/open positioning and made it a reality. Kevin McGinnis was the strongest internal champion and became the most visible external connector of Sprint into the Kansas City startup community and beyond.

Kevin’s work led to my second set of job-related activities involving startups. Sprint decided to actively participate in mobile innovation by partnering with leading startup accelerator company TechStars in launching the Sprint Accelerator for mobile startups. Sprint renovated an old building into a collaborative space in the midst of Kansas City’s innovation district, and early in 2014 announced an initial class of 10 companies from around the world seeking to advance the mobility revolution.

I spent a fair amount of time at the Accelerator over the next several months. I worked especially closely with Ollo Mobile, an Australian company developing a safety and communications solution for seniors. I also helped with an internal “Startup Weekend” exercise for Sprint employees. I made myself available to the Accelerator team to help anyway I could.

I was proud of how Sprint was empowering startups as the company embraced its own role within the innovation ecosystem. I was glad to be part of it, hopefully contributing from my knowledge, experience, and connections, but also learning about Lean Startup and how the entrepreneurial approach was changing.

But it wasn’t just at work that I was able to feed my startup “sweet tooth.”

My family was part of the local homeschooling community. In the evenings, at times, I would teach classes that would include multiple homeschooling families. One class I taught was on “The Seven Disciplines of Biblical Business Success” where I paired business disciplines with Biblical values — for example marketing with integrity. (The content for the class also turned into a series of articles available here.) I had the students form teams and develop business plans for their own business ideas, and at the end of the class they “pitched” their business ideas to an audience made up of their families.

One of the concepts explored in that class was a social network for homeschooling families. This was back in 2008 when MySpace was still the dominant social networking site, but Facebook was starting to come on strong. There were already news stories demonstrating the dangers to kids of social networking sites and parents were concerned. But homeschoolers are natural networkers and tend to be early adopters of technology. The idea of a service with all the benefits of online social networking, but with protections for families and their faith was very appealing.

Seeing it as a great educational opportunity, early in 2009 we formed Christian Homeschool Network, LLC and began working with middle and high school homeschool students to develop a strategy and build a platform that could securely serve homeschooling families. The service launched as hschooler.net in March 2010. Later, we rebranded as CXfriends to appeal to a broader audience.

Over the course of about six years, the service grew to a membership of over 1000 families, but more importantly, ten students gained valuable experience launching and running a business. As the students got into their later high school years and started approaching graduation their interest in the business began to wane. We finally shut the service down in 2016.

As I said at the top of this story, I spent 11 years at Sprint. By about year 10, I was feeling burned out. I needed a change. And that change will be tomorrow’s story.