I founded my company back in 1991 technically. I was a "DBA" (Doing business as") from my college dorm room. In 1993, I incorporated the company (or technically, my mom actually did the incorporation). I was still about a year from graduation at that point. It was just me still. It wasn't until 1995 that I got an office and started hiring people to work with.
And I can tell you, my training in Electrical Engineering did not prepare me for being an employer. Based on some of the emails or posts I read every few weeks, quite a few people think I have no business running a business in the first place. The first emails predicting the demise of my business started pretty much right away due to my tendancy to put myself out there. I met Steven Den Beste via flame wars on Usenet back in 1996 and in the OS/2 market there were plenty of people who personified our entire company based on me because I was a very vocal poster even then.
Anyone who thinks what I write is "inappropriate" or bound to doom my business to oblivion due to me saying incorrect things will have to use their imaginations as to how much more "inappropriate" I was 10 years ago when I was 23 instead of 33. I'm much more mellow now.
As my business has grown over the past decade, I've had to learn all kinds of things I never imagined having to learn. Inter-employee issues. Empathy. How to work with people more effectively. And many other non-engineer-related things. I've seen friendships crumble and I've seen reverse age discrimination (what seasoned professional wants to have to do what some 23 year old punk kid tells them to do?). It's been quite a ride so far.
This next week we're moving into a new building. The new building isn't just a new place for us to work in. It's a symbol. We're not leasing it. We bought it. We own it. And we did it right. Anyone who visits us will, I think, see it as a "real" business. Where we currently are, it's in an office building but because of our erratic growth, the place is not well set up. Walking through the halls of our company is a lot like playing Radar Rat Race. It's a maze. We would grow a bit and lease another part of the building, grow a little more and lease another part, and so on.
Still, even as our company has succeeded, every once in awhile something will come up and I'll just smile because the person talking to me is taking for granted that everything is going to be taken care of. And they're right. But I don't know if it's true to say that business people are born that way. I think they're made.
At the end of the day, I'm just some guy who found a career that generated a lot of money. In time, I needed help to do all the things that needed done. And then one day, you wake up and you have dozens of people working together with you to create really cool stuff. But it was not intentional. It just..happened. One day you're talking to some IBMer from your dorm room hoping they don't realize they're doing business with some kid in his dorm room and the next day you're dealing with personnel issues like whether everyone should use the new standardized chairs or be able to bring in their own custom chairs.