And people say I’m ambitious.  Sojern has set out with a defined goal of creating $1 billion of shareholder value over the next 3-4 years.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great group of people with lots of talent.  They’ve got the resources and management with enough business acumen and sales experience to probably pull it off.  However, that’s one hell of a goal to start out with!

If nothing else, Sojern should be an interesting ride.  I’m not convinced the business is ready (maybe in six months) for my skill-set yet; however, I’ll do everything I can in the meantime.  Hopefully, I’m wrong and they will need to develop all of the components currently being discussed in parallel.  I suspect quite a few components and concepts will fall into v3, v4, and v5 discussions, because this project strikes me as substantially larger than most people involved want to admit.  I have been accused of biting too much off at the same time, but I’ve never seen an entire office do it at the same time.  I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to not notice some of the signs.

Despite all of this, the monstrous goals, the gargantuan challenges, the short time-line, I still think Sojern will probably succeed.  It is just a matter of time.  Given the collection of experience already in the room and the several million dollars in angel investment already acquired, I doubt it’ll take very long for success to find Sojern.

I’ll be working at their headquarters in Omaha, which should be interesting.  I’ve heard good things about the work environment, but suspect the internal IT projects are underfunded with poorly implemented incentives around the business unit… which is pretty status quo for IT in my experience.  Either way, this will keep me busy through at least the first week or two of September, which is good.  With a little luck I’ll have the consulting business up to speed by the time this contract runs out.