John Dimmer

First things first, I was not present the day that John Dimmer visited. So this post will be an amalgamation of what I have learned from others who were in attendance and of course the other blog posts who have written up something about him. From what I gathered and also from previous mentions by Professor Fry John is a longtime friend and onetime business partner of our Professor. They were both present at Free Range Media although John came onto the project later into the experiment. John talked with the class about the importance of gathering investments and also cautioned about the dangers of gathering capital investments. The more capital that a company gains capital funding your equity in that company drops. Essentially as more people are given portions of the pie to control your portion of the pie inevitably must shrink. As Chad pointed out in his blog, Code Crab, John and Andrew were and are friends, which is counter to the idea of never going into business with your friends. This mentality generally stems from the notion that once your friends become your business partners they are no longer in the same category they once were in. There is truth in this but it is possible to remain friends with someone through the construction and management and sometimes failure of a business. If your friendship cannot last through some hardship than it may not have been that strong to begin with, and what better way to forge a friendship than through the unity through challenge and perseverance. Plus as John said, if you don’t go into a business with a friend than who else do you trust enough to go in with?