We’ve started building out our new site. Go take a look. Then come back and say complimentary things about it in the comments section of this post.

I suppose Mr. Tran’s Sriracha concern can’t really be considered a startup anymore, But, it is an epic tale of capitalism. A company with humble roots overcoming epic adversity, including war (try that you web 2.0 feebs) to become the Heinz of hot sauce.

Read the NY Times article here and feel the burn.

We have a mission statement here at Graphient. It took us a fair amount of time and a lot of re-writes to work it out properly. One reason it took so long was some confusion on my part about what a mission statement really is. It seemed pretty obvious to me that our mission as hardheaded businessmen was to make huge amounts of money. Or, put another way, to become profitable in a timely manner and maximize shareholder value. Turns out those aren’t missions, and they cannot be used to accurately measure the success of the enterprise or to motivate those involved.

We finally worked it out as “Graphient’s mission is to provide everyone in the world with platforms for the organization and visualization of information that are simple enough for any home user, but powerful enough for research, science, and business.”

There’s nothing in there about profitability, and were we a Silicon Valley company we might be content to end this conversation here and go play frisbee with our dog or something. Fortunately we live in New York, and if living here has taught us anything, it is that if you don’t make enough money for rent and food, you have to move back to whatever provincial backwater you came from.

That’s a round about way of saying that one of the tests for whether or not you are a company or just a bunch of guys sitting in room together engaged in company-like behavior is profitability. Profit is the test that must be met. It is what validates the mission, and without it you don’t have an enterprise, you have a meme.

Blogging about your first start-up is a funny proposition. You have a lot of opinions and ideas about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, but there’s no identifiable reason why anyone should listen to you yap about them. You may have an engaging prose style or whatever, but you haven’t done anything yet to distinguish yourself from every other opinionated clown who thinks his company is going to change the world.

That thing, The Win, whatever it is, hasn’t come yet. And without it you are just a (possibly) smart, (possibly) charming voice chattering away in the vast digital wilderness. Worse, small victories don’t seem to count. And they shouldn’t, incremental gain (while it builds a strong foundation for your business) isn’t enough to distiguish your voice from all the others. It is not enough to make you extra-ordinary, not enough to make you what Seth Godin calls a Purple Cow, not enough to make you remarkable. You have to really smack it out of the park for it to count as The Win.

Nevertheless, we’re going to blog about the process we’re going through. If we do get The Win, this will stand as a record of the process that brought us there, and if we don’t it will stand as a testament to the lessons we learned.