I’ve recently been thinking about how I ended up in the media business. The more I think about it, the more I realize how things affected me at a rather young age. All this thinking has ended up as a new “category” of evolvor.com. I hope by sharing with you all the little moments in my life that have brought me to this point, you can see how I have grown over the years and how I have developed my various skills. Also, I hope you’ll share your own experiences as well, and maybe we’ll find some similarities in our development.

I’m going to start with my business drive. I’m pretty sure it started right around the age of 11-12. Me and my posse of cool-yet-geek friends spent our free time collecting and trading comic books and related trading cards. During recess, when we weren’t jumping the creek at the end of the playground, we were running our own business. See we would buy different packs of trading cards, keep the ones we wanted, then re-package them in half-envelopes and sling ‘em to our friends. Each week there was either a new hot “seller” who had a great product or a “dud” kid who was selling crap.

We all learned basic principles of supply and demand, in addition to marketing principles like how to hype a product and building a brand (after some time certain kids, myself included, had built up our reputation of having good stuff that we could always sell our product. This business eventually spilled over and incorporated action figures as that collecting craze began to take off. Now remember, this is like 5th-6th grade, so the only real money most of these kids had was their lunch money. It got to the point where kids were not eating lunch, their parents got involved, and the school killed it. Driven out by new “government regulations”, our businesses took a hit as our marketplace diminished. We would all starve over the next few years as we plotted our next move.

At the same time, the comic industry collapsed bad and would continue to loose sales over the next few years. Marvel actually declared Chapter 11 at one point. Coincidence ? Maybe. Point is I also learned how markets can change dramatically by things beyond your control, and you gotta be ready to adapt or you’ll go under. All at age 11.