This past Monday, my parents discovered my blog. My Mom and Dad live on a farm in Idaho (more about my growing up on a farm in Idaho in another post), and their Internet connection speed is a crummy 24.4 kbps (that’s what happens when you surf over phone lines that were installed in the early-1920s). Anyway, when they jumped online to read some of my posts, it must have been out of either GREAT curiosity–or a lot of love–because their Internet is paralyzing slow. I mean, we’re talking, ‘the Google home page takes about a minute to load’ type of slow.

Nevertheless, Mom (or Dad, not sure which) typed “JeremyHanks.com” into the address bar, and a few minutes later they landed on this site, and a few minutes after that they chose to leave the following comments:

“Where did he learn to write like this? (Dad) Gee, he ought to write a book (Dad)” — this comment was left on my Leading By Getting Out of the Way post

“This is so great….I sure have a smart son!!” — this comment was left on my Adventure Buddies post

Later that day, I saw from my Caller ID that my Mom had tried to call, and when I called her back and said, “Hey, what’s up?, she said that she had called to find my blog address but had found it anyway, and oh by the way, “…did you see the comments we left for you?

Now, I want you to imagine for moment what it’s like being on black ice with one foot about to slip out from underneath you. My first thought was, Oh No. But I refrained and politely asked, “What comments? How did you send them? She replied with something like, “On the site; you know, where it says ‘comments’. We left two of them.”

So I proceeded to explain to my Mom how blogs work, and how those comments get posted for anyone to read. She was very embarrassed, to say the least, and said, “You HAVE to take them down. I don’t want anyone to know.”

I’ll be honest, my first thoughts were along those very same lines… I probably should take them down to save her and me any embarrassment; but then I realized that the beauty of blogging is the authenticity that comes from conversations between the blogger and the reader; so no, they would stay. Besides, I have an RSS feed for the comments, and they were already out there for everyone who subscribes to my feed, so even if I wanted to, it’d be impossible to take it back, so-to-speak. (I then ATTEMPTED to explain RSS to my Mom, and how the comments on my blog have a feed, and how a lot of people would already have them. That part of the conversation was really interesting, let me just say that. )

All of this leads me to the point of today’s post. I think in general, parents of adults really don’t get what their kids do. Whether it’s being an entrepreneur that runs Doba (to this day, after at least 100 explanations, my Mom still doesn’t understand what Doba does, so she tells her close friends that she thinks I must be doing something illegal since we’re doing so well), or an advertising executive, chemical engineer, or a web developer, or even a child trying to explain RSS to their parent, parents try their best to get it but often times do not. Too much changes in the roughly 25 years that pass from when a child arrives and they find themselves in the beginning stages of a career. I already see that happening to me. I have no idea what all the fuss is about MySpace, and my daughter is still a good number of years away from the MySpace replacement that will enamor her.

At the end of the day though, do parents need to really get it? I contented that they do not. They’ll try to understand but since they have such deep love for us–their kids–that’s really all they need to understand.

So for the best two comments I’ve gotten on my blog so far, I wanted to let my parents know I really love them too. Guaran-damn-teed, I wouldn’t be were I am today without them. And if they read this post after a 45 minute download on a 24.4 kbps Internet connection, well, I guess that shows me and everyone else that they love me too, even though I still think the word “Blog” to them sounds like something from Star Trek.

In a couple of months, a group of us from Doba will be headed to Las Vegas, Nevada, to exhibit at eBay Live! 2006 (June 13-15, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center). For the uninitiated, eBay Live! is the largest platform for anyone who wants to shine in front of the entire eBay Community. On a more practical and logistical level, it’s a 3-day event where thousands of eBay Community members, industry experts, and vendors like Doba gather to learn, network, make new friends, and celebrate everything eBay.

With more than 10,000 attendees, tons of workshops and panel discussions, and hundreds of exhibitors, eBay Live! is one of Doba’s best chances to share our unique lineup of product or services in person with thousands of eBay Community members, eBay staff, and key eBay executives from around the globe.

For me, eBay Live! provides an opportunity to reconnect with old friends, as well as a chance to educate my peers. In addition to working in the Doba exhibit booth—#315 just in case anyone’s interested in stopping by and saying hello—I’ll be one of three featured speakers on a panel moderated by eBay University Instructor Steve Lindhorst entitled “Product Sourcing: How to Find Products Your Buyers Want. I’ll also be using time during the show to promote my new book, eBay Inventory The Smart Way, at a booth across the hall from Doba’s (#934).

For Doba, months of preparation and planning go into our participation at this one show. From our perspective, as one of only 25 eBay Certified Service Providers on the planet, this show is critical. Doba Team Members attending this year’s show include:

• Elwon Bakley: Member Services Supervisor
• Alia Calano: Financial Specialist
• Brandon Delgrosso: VP of Marketing
• Mary Kay Evans: VP of Corporate Communications
• Ruth Ann Esterholt: Supplier Fulfillment Specialist
• Dave Gray: Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder
• Jeremy Hanks, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
• Keith Hester: Director of Engineering
• Jerry Khemraj: Outbound Sales Supervisor
• Jeff Knight: Director of Merchandising
• Stu Lisonbee: Marketing Specialist
• Roy Merrill: Software Engineer
• Eric Mortensen: Email Marketing Specialist
• Blaine Nieslen: Exec VP Finance/Operations
• Jared Richards: VP Sales and Service
• Meagen Ridley: Executive Assistant
• Ryan Roberts: Marketing Specialist
• Jared Sidwell: Manager of Partner Channel
• Angela Soffe: Copywriter
• Brandon Williams: Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder
• Clark Winegar: Director of Marketing

I’ll be blogging more about eBay Live!—and the value of trade shows in general—in the weeks to come. In the meantime, if you’re planning on attending this year’s show and you’d like to schedule some time with me or someone else from among Doba’s list of attendees, please feel free to leave a comment below or send me a note via my Contact page. As I said when I first started this blog, I’m extremely approachable and I really enjoy connecting with people who are engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits.

Last Monday, in a post titled The Value of Custom Publishing: Part I, I wrote that one of the benefits to authoring a book is the exposure and credibility you receive from having your name appear on the book’s cover. While some authors write books for the gobs of money they hope to receive from some combination of an ‘advance’ and royalties, I chose to co-author mine because:

1. I wanted to share my knowledge with as many people as possible; and,
2. I wanted to gain ‘thought leader’ status on the topics I choose to write about (namely, product sourcing and drop shipping).

The day after I wrote that blog entry, Stacey Miller at the Book Promotion Blog had this to say:

Your book publicist will assume that you are promoting your book to disseminate your messages to as many people as possible…You have something to say, and your book is one outlet for saying it; the mass media provides additional venues for you to spread your messages. In addition, many authors believe their visibility in the media will lead to great opportunities such as … additional clients or customers, or enhanced credibility in the professional world. This is usually what happens.

It’s gratifying to read an industry veteran like Miller share those thoughts. I didn’t co-author my latest book, eBay Inventory The Smart Way: How to Find Great Sources and Manage Your Merchandise to Maximize Profits on the World’s #1 Auction Site because I have some grandiose notion that I’m going to get rich by selling hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote that book because I feel as though I have some really profound things to say about product sourcing, and I’m the type of person who’s willing to share ideas by any means necessary, whether you want to hear them or not.

Speaking of the new book, its been out for a little less than a month now, and with a recent ACNielsen International Research study showing the #1 concern of eBay sellers is what to sell and how to find suppliers, I continue to have nothing but high hopes for the number of people the book can have an impact on. In fact, the number of eBay sellers keeps growing. ACNielsen also reports that 724,000 Americans credit eBay sales as their primary or secondary source of income, with another 1.5 million people reporting that they supplement their income by selling on eBay. Based on those figures alone, the number of eBay entrepreneurs in the U.S. has increased 68 percent since the last time a comparable study was conducted (in 2003). With numbers like those, maybe I could make gobs and gobs of money by writing books, but then again, where’s the fun in that? Sure, there’s a unique sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing your name on the cover of a book, but can anything aside from marriage and parenthood really beat being an entrepreneur? Not for me. It’s being an entrepreneur that I credit with allowing me to write books, not the other way around.

One of the greatest experiences and joys in my life is being a dad. My wife Amy and I have one daughter, Kaitlin, and are expecting a son this June. One of my really good friends, Chris Knudsen, told me once about something he did with his kids prior to me having any of my own. Rather than just sit at home and play with toys or hang out in the backyard together, Chris would take his kids out on mini-adventures. He called it Adventure Buddies, and I liked the idea so much that when Kaitlin came along, we started going on Adventure Buddy excursions of our own.

By design, we’d leave Mom behind, and head off on our own. When she was younger, I’d throw Kaitlin in the Baby Bjorn and we’d head out on a hike. Sometimes, it’d just mean going down to REI, Cabelas, or Best Buy (three of her absolute favorite stores). Well, Kaitlin turned two last month, and I said, you know what; we’re going to kick things up a notch; we’re going camping.

I think most people thought I was plumb nuts. A two-year-old and her crazy Dad heading off to Arches National Park by themselves? I know Amy initially thought I was out of my mind. Buy hey, a side benefit of Adventure Buddies is some alone time for Mom, so she was on board.

Arches is about a three-hour drive from where we live in Utah. We headed out on a Friday afternoon, and to say that Kaitlin was pretty excited about the whole deal would be an understatement. We had been spending time playing with “daddy’s toys,” i.e., tents and sleeping bags in the basement, and she definitely thought they were cool. I even bought Kaitlin her own sleeping bag from REI for her birthday (trust me, it’s wicked cute). When we got to our campground, she helped me set up camp in the dark using an extra headlamp I’d brought along as a backup. Kaitlin absolutely loved that thing, and all she did for the first ten minutes or so was run around in the dark with my nifty headlamp adorning her tiny forehead. She was so excited to be there that we ended up walking around the campground in the dark—with our headlamps–for a good hour before I could convince her to head back to the tent for stories and bedtime.

After a pretty uneventful night, Kaitlin was up at 5:30 am, ready to roll. We walked a bit (she chased a cottontail bunny rabbit on the trail behind our camp for a while), made pancakes for breakfast, and then headed off to see the park.

One of the best parts of Adventure Buddies with a two-year-old is that she feels none of the urgency or pressure that we adults do. She didn’t need to hike to Delicate Arch to feel like she’d experienced Arches. She just liked climbing all over the “big rocks” and sliding down them like a water slide.

It was a great experience to set out on several small hikes with her and to see her having as much fun jumping around on the man-made steps on the trail as she was in getting to the actual Windows Area and seeing the arches for herself. A far simpler and less stressful mindset; and one we should all work towards.

After a half-day of playing around, we headed back home. We had a ton of fun together, and I get really excited thinking of the many Adventure Buddy trips I’ll be talking in the future with Kaitlin and her soon-to-arrive brother. In fact, I’m already planning our next camping trip–to either Yellowstone or Grand Teton–sometime within the next few months.

So, what does any of this have to do with entrepreneurship? On the surface, not much, really. But if you dig deeper into the entrepreneurial mindset, you’re bound to find that true entrepreneurs do similar things at home as they do at work (and I’m not talking about workaholic type of stuff either). True entrepreneurs have a spirit of adventure (the word “adventure,” in fact, is derived from the Latin word meaning “to venture”). The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said that an entrepreneur is someone who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation, forcing “creative destruction” across markets and industries along the way.

Honestly, that’s how I view myself, both at work AND at home (and I know my wife would back me up on this… especially on the “creative destruction” part). I’m just as entrepreneurial when it comes to tinkering around the house as I am when I’m at the office, and that’s what separates one entrepreneur from another. People like me have an entrepreneurial gene that impacts 100 percent of the things we do. There’s no accounting for it and there’s certainly no rhyme or reason why me and not someone else.

You see, when I look at Adventure Buddies, I see way more than just an awesome way to spend time with my Daughter. And if you’re like me, and you’re thinking to yourself, hey, this Adventure Buddies deal might have some legs, there might be a business there. Don’t worry, I’ve got those bases covered already. <<>>

In any event, if you have kids of your own, get them out on some Adventure Buddy trips. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did, and it will be really cool way to spend time together someplace other than inside your own house.

Thanks to Greg Galant over at Venture Voice, I just read an interesting entrepreneurship-related article in The Economist titled Searching for the Invisible Man: Economics Rediscovers the Entrepreneur . The point of the article, I believe, is to suggest that from a macro economics perspective, economic theory has very little to say in terms of the size, scope, and value of the contributions entrepreneurs make in terms of economic implications on GDP. Huh? Are you kidding me?

Since I’m such a firm believer in the notion that everyone who starts a company is an entrepreneur, I fail to see why it’s so difficult for economists–or anyone for that matter–to benchmark our economic contributions. Every single Fortune 500 company was started by an entrepreneur (except of course those that were spun off by another company). Microsoft, Cargill, Wal-Mart, Kohler, Nike, Home Depot, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Johnson & Johnson, along with most other private and publicly-held companies were all started by somebody, weren’t they? Indeed; they were all started by an entrepreneur–someone who saw a revolutionary gap in a market and had determination and guts to risk everything in order to realize a dream.

So, for me at least, I think economists and The Economist magazine need to get out of the ivory tower and take a look at what’s happening here on the ground. Entrepreneurs are almost everywhere you look, except of course in most well established companies.

You see, the real point of Gallant’s post was to point out–in his own words–the “… distinction in innovation between incremental improvements (making a slightly better version of what’s already out there) and “discontinuous breakthroughs”… such as the incandescent lamp, alternating electric current, or the jet engine, and how entrepreneurs are more adept at doing the latter.

As Galant so astutely notes, simplicity defies established companies; entrepreneurs are irrational; and, entrepreneurs are more likely to develop breakthrough innovations that are disruptive to traditional business models. He also writes:

Why would a profitable corporation want to make a disruptive breakthrough? And if they did make such a discovery, fear would likely keep them from bringing it to market. In fact, Xerox PARC made many breakthroughs such as the mouse and advanced graphical user interfaces. It didn’t have an incentive to cannibalize its dominant paper copy business, so it didn’t put much effort into spreading those innovations. Steve Jobs had nothing to lose from building products on those innovations (except for the long-term health of one of his investors, Xerox, but that didn’t matter to him), and ultimately computers progressed to the point that fewer paper copies were needed.

My point exactly. These days, it seems like so much of what drives corporate America (as opposed to entrepreneurial America) is fear… fear of operating outside of organizational norms or of pissing off someone you’ve never even met who works up on the top floor of corporate headquarters. Everyone’s so afraid of losing their job that just they play it safe. ‘Don’t Rock The Boat‘ is the mantra played in corporate hallways, when in reality, rockin’ the boat is exactly how successful companies got to be where they are in the first place.

So, what does all of this have to do with my company and me? Well, if I’m still here in five or ten years running Doba, I’d hope that I would be the type of CEO who fosters an entrepreneurial spirit among everyone roaming our hallways. Rock the boat, I say. Innovate, get disruptive, and bring a touch of madness to the workplace each and every day. Without it, Doba will surely fail to meet its customer’s needs.

Go ahead… don’t worry about pissing me off!