The Glamorous Life of a Startup CEO

Parties, schmoozing, junkets, respect and admiration, what's not to like about the glamorous life of running a startup?

I'm in Manhattan today for an industry conference which runs all next week. We've got a booth, we're sponsoring one of the major events, and I'm going to spend a lot of my time talking to an audience. So what am I doing with my day off before the action starts?

Well, this evening, I stuffed 450 CDs into jewel cases and envelopes.

You see, by ordering our demo CDs on spindles (instead of in sleeves or cases), we were able to save a few hundred bucks. Jewel cases are almost free these days when you watch for the promotions: many office supply and computer stores discount them to $10/hundred or even less as a loss leader. So, every time I see a sale like that, I snap up a few hundred jewel cases.

We also traveled out a day early (to get cheaper airfares), leaving a day off. The show promoters are talking about 3,500 attendees--huge for this industry, and almost twice the size of last year. We're skeptical (as everyone should be when it comes to trade show promoters), and planning on 2,000 attendees. At the last similar event, we gave CDs to about 15% of the attendees.

That means we should give away between 300 and 500 CDs, depending on how optimistic the promoters were. Just to be safe, we packed 900 CDs in our luggage (CDs on spindles pack very well), along with 350 jewel cases, and 300 paper envelopes. The jewel cases took up twice as much room as all the CDs combined.

We lost about 5% of the jewel cases in travel (blame soft-sided luggage and hard-bodied luggage handlers), which isn't too bad. Remember, we bought them on sale, so we can afford to lose a few.

So, I took advantage of the day off to stuff half the CDs into jewel cases and envelopes. We'll give the jewel cases away first: they look a lot nicer, and we really don't want to carry them back home. Besides, they're cheaper than the envelopes. Leftovers will get shipped directly to our next show, in Florida in two weeks. I'm guessing we'll schlep a bunch more jewel cases to Florida, too, so we can stuff the waiting CDs when we get there.

But only if jewel cases are on sale.