I’m back from my backpacking trip to the Wind River Mountain range in Western Wyoming. You can read a full trip report and see lots of pictures at www.jercore.com

The highlight of the trip for me was clinging to the summit of Fremont Peak:

At 13,745 feet, Fremont Peak is the 3rd highest peak in Wyoming. It’s only 59 feet lower than the highest peak, Gannett Peak, also in the Wind Rivers. I don’t use the term ‘clinging’ lightly either. The wind was gusting over 40 MPH, and there was a sheer cliff just below me. But I wanted to make sure I touched the highest point on that mountain.

This was a big personal accomplishment for me. It’s the highest I’ve ever been (by 1,996 feet). It’s only the second Class 3 — (Class III – climbing, often on steep rock or snow. Handholds and footholds must be utilized to make upward progress. Injury inducing falls of up to five or six feet are possible. You must use your hands to make upward progress.) — scramble I’ve ever done. Our basecamp was over 12 miles into the backcountry and then it was an additional 4.5 miles of hiking and 3,300 feet of elevation gain from that basecamp to the summit. In short: it wasn’t easy to get to where that picture was taken.

When I got back, I got thinking about how the process of reaching a summit can apply to business. So over the next few weeks, intermixed with other posts I’m sure, I’ll be posting my thoughts and ideas that draw from what I learned on my most recent adventure to the mountains.

It’s good to be back. But it was sure good to be gone too.

I’ve found a system that works well to keep me going 110 miles an hour. (should that be 110%? - either way I guess it means going and going all out)

I take at least one, sometimes two, 4-6 day long trips a year. I’ve negotiated with my wife and family so that I can make these trips work. I look forward to these trips as a way to recharge and regroup very much. I purposefully plan trips that long so that I can disconnect from the world, from Doba, from everything really.

One way I make sure that I can really disconnect is that I head out into the middle of nowhere. Places where cell phones don’t work. Dark Spots on the Map.

Over the years, I have gone on some amazing trips with a really good group of guys. I decided to chronicle our travels (or travails as they may be) on a website. So I jumped onto Wordpress.com, setup a blog, picked a template, used Picnik (one of the greatest services I’ve ever used) to edit some pics, and about 5-6 hours later, www.jercore.com was up and running:

For this trip that we leave on tomorrow, I rented a satellite phone and we’re going to try and do daily dispatches from the backcountry in the Wind River mountains. So if you want to follow along, subscribe to the RSS feed from www.jercore.com.

I’ll be back and posting again here the end of next week. Don’t worry about me though. I’m not afraid of the dark.

This week has been interesting. I think it was my shot at my 15 minutes of fame. I’ve been ‘in the news’ 3 times.

First, Utah Business’s cover article for August 2007 was called The State of Small Business: Building the Most Dynamic Economy in the Nation. In this article, Jacob Moon interviews several Utah entrepreneurs about the interactions of cooperation, competition, and Utah specific culture in their efforts to build and grow companies. Recently, the 2007 State New Economy Index, a major study performed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, ranked Utah # 1 in the country for “economic dynamism” and I put in my $0.02 about some of the challenges and opportunities that Doba has faced and seen in that type of economic environment. I think it’s a great article. And with my call out quote in the article (see pic below), I’m sure the folks running Omniture and MyFamily.com are trembling in their boots cause Doba’s coming for their best and brightest one day!

Note, I only put the pics up so that you could see that: a) I can wear a nice button-down shirt and look good doing it (right on for the Doba green background!), and b) I can wear a nice plain gray t-shirt and look good doing it too. Shoot, maybe I just look good no matter what I wear.

Next, I was Interviewed on Wednesday for the Online Marketing with RSS Ray radio show that is produced by wsRadio.com.

There are 2 segments to the show. In the first segment, I talked about Doba and some of the common challenges and best practices that online sellers could be faced with and should be aware of. The second segment talks more about my books and what I’ll be talking about at Online Market World in San Francisco Oct 3-5. Links to both: Segment 1 Segment 2

Finally, last week, Brad Baldwin from Rocky Mountain Voices came down to interview me about Doba and that was posted up on PodTech yesterday. You can watch the embedded interview below, or visit the Drop Ship Product Sourcing with Doba page at Podtech.

I think that’s what they call a ‘trifecta’ for being in the news: Print, Radio, Video. 15 minutes over, now back to work.

Now we get to the real reason I flew nearly the circumference of the earth in order to get to India. As cool as the Culture was, that wasn’t why we went.

The real reason that Dave Gray (Doba’s CTO) and I went to India was so that we could spend 26 hours meeting with 5 different companies over 4 days in 4 different cities. We met with Aditi Technologies in Bangalore, ValueLabs and AppLabs in Hyderabad, Persistent Systems in Pune, and Impetus in Noida.

Doba is kicking off plans to open an offshore development center. This is a decision that we’ve come to after careful consideration of lots of different factors. The main driving force behind these plans is a need to have access to additional capacity and flexibility with our development efforts. We have a development and technology team based in UT that is amazing. And that team will continue to grow over time. We also want the benefits that an offshore development center offers us. There are definitely challenges with this strategy, and that’s why Dave and I talked with and met with everyone we could to talk about the pros/cons of this decision. We talked to other technology companies, we talked to Venture Capitalists; basically everyone and anyone we had contacts with so that we could educate ourselves on what to do and what not to do with an initiative like this. Dave spent the good part of 3 weeks getting referrals for companies that manage the development for you and checking on their references so that we could make sure our offshore partner was the best of the best. In the end, we picked 5 companies to meet with in India, and are in the mid-stages of picking our partner overseas.

India was a great experience for me. I think I finally caught the vision of globalization. There are so many opportunities with the way the world has changed in the last 15-20 years and with how it’s continuing to change at increasing rates over the next many years. I’m excited for Doba to engage in global commerce in a new way. I’m excited for our current technology/development teams to further their careers by helping Doba embark on this new road. In the end, I’m excited for me to be able to gain experience with something new, exciting, and challenging–and full of opportunity for Doba, our customers, and our employees.

I’ve tried to not talk much about politics on my blog. Politics are polarizing. And in my role as CEO of Doba, I’ve tried to stick to ’safer’ topics because I know that many Doba customers read what I write.

But I’m going to change that. There are serious problems in America, and when I come across something that needs to be looked at, needs to be considered, needs to be understood by all of us, I’ll put it up here. I’m not going to say that I necessarily will try to propose solutions to these problems. I consider myself a pretty smart guy and I know my entrepreneurial mind is pretty good at finding ideas to solve problems. But at a minimum, I’m going to do my small part to help increase the visibility and exposure to legitimate major problems that are facing our country. Legitimate major problems that we need courageous leaders and visionaries to solve. Legitimate major problems that for damn sure we don’t need poser politicians to solve. Poser politicians that are unwilling to act–unwilling make the tough calls and decisions–towards solving these problems.

Anyway, my good friend Chris Knudsen posted some things that I’m going to re-post here. I hope others take them and post them wherever they can. Americans need to wake up and understand that our so-called leadership in this country are going to ruin this great experiment that is America.

David Walker is the Comptroller General of the United States. The Comptroller General of the United States is the director of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a legislative branch agency founded by Congress in 1921 to ensure the accountability of the federal government.

This guy knows what he’s talking about. Anyway, you NEED to go read this article from CBS News: U.S. Heading For Financial Trouble? (watch the embedded video on the right as well) And then you need to go read this article from Financial Times: Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned. And then you nned to watch these videos:

And then you might ask: so what should I do about it? I have to believe in the system we have, it’s the only one we’ve got. So our system of government is based on the fact that we all have the right as citizens to find the leaders who will address these problems. Let’s find the leaders. Let’s demand action from them. Let’s let them know that we will be OK with them if they make tough choices that aren’t in their short-term interests as a poser politician but are in the long-term interests of America.

More to come…