The summer before my senior year in college, a friend of mine came up with an idea for a video game accessory, which was a padded cover for video game controllers like PlayStation and Xbox to create a more comfortable gaming experience.

Ironically I didn’t play video games but thought it was an interesting idea. I ultimately came to an agreement with the friend, in which he would cover the intellectual property fees and I would develop the product. So I bought a sewing machine and some fabric, thought myself how to sew, developed a prototype, found a manufacturer with ties to factories in China, and had a small order produced. I ended up buying a small space to exhibit at E3, the largest video game conference. Through that, I met the buyer of video game accessories for walmart.com and a few months later secured distribution through walmart.com and later target.com.

With no money to market the product, I sent samples to gaming sites and journalists who covered gaming, which lead to over 30 articles in different media outlets from Entrepreneur Magazine to the New York Times. After working on it for about a year I realized there wasn’t as big a demand for the product as I had thought. It was a big learning experience in the importance of flushing an idea out before pursuing it. Regardless, it was an experience that taught me a lot.

Near the end of my senior year a video game accessory company contacted me, and shortly after that I ended up licensing the product to them. After graduating I moved back to my hometown (Seattle) and leveraged the experience to get into grad school at Seattle Pacific University, where I pursued my MBA for the following two years.

At the beginning of my time at SPU, I began to fall in love with the web. I loved how there was a disconnect between growth and resources needed. With any physical business, you can only grow so fast. You have to secure new locations, purchase equipment, hire/manage people in different cities, etc. but with the web, an additional X users/visitors is not correlated with the need for additional people. There is a disconnect, and that disconnect allows you grow at a much faster rate. Something I absolutely love.