It’s hard to put everything in words. The AdamsBlock chapter of my life was both the best and the worst. If anyone was going to make it work, it was me but I gave up too early. Most entrepreneurs that give up do so because of exhaustion, lack of motivation and the difficulty of being the only person who cares about the idea. I didn’t have those problems. My failure was something different from the standard list of startup failures. It wasn’t for a lack of exhaustion. My failure was out of fear for my life and my girlfriend’s at the time.
How many startups have this problem? CNN and NPR are banging down your door along with thugs who want you to stop broadcasting and go back to the way things were and the investors are excited and you’re getting phone calls from police departments all over the world and camera companies are giving you credit lines to secure recording equipment and both citizens and engineering talent are messaging you daily asking to be involved. It’s not something entrepreneurs usually deal with. That was my situation.
While that was happening, my life was becoming a living hell. I had a full time job, a blog, a networking event every night and a girlfriend who saw me far too little on weeks where I’d just live at the office and never come home and then I had this other thing that was pulling on me to jump in 100%. I still receive monthly emails from people asking me about AdamsBlock. I still see it referenced in documentaries about the Internet and transparency. Occupy Wall Street has brought more attention to citizen policing and activism. Our direct connection to news as it happens is still live streaming from mobile phones via Ustream or Justin.TV.
It’s been 3 years since my camera turned off at 250 Taylor Street. It came off the week following my return from Reno and has remained off since then. I have the Logitech QuickCam in my office. I use it for Skype calls. A $99 web cam connected to an old PC garnered millions of views via a free Justin.TV account. It’s remarkable.
It took a year after that camera turning off to sleep well again. My sleep schedule wasn’t affected by the thugs who continued to harass me and force me to move out of my apartment with death threats and attempted burglary. My sleep was affected by the pain in my heart of knowing that this would truly change the world and I gave up far too soon. I had the chance to change the world with a product that was far more important than my meager life and I didn’t go through with it. I gave up on something that could have changed the world. Maybe I’m delusional but when our recording saves someone’s life who was beat live on camera and when rape victims email you begging a camera to be put up at their work parking lot and when the San Francisco Police email me following a murder assuming that AdamsBlock is live on some random street corner in The Mission, well it’s a drive that you just can’t ignore. I couldn’t ignore it and I gave up.
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It’s doubtful that I’ll ever renew my commitment to AdamsBlock going forward. Clearly, I should be the founder not because I started it but because if you saw the documents I have on my hard drive with plans, expansion details and hardware and server specifications, you’d see that all of the footwork has been done. AdamsBlock is 90% ready to launch and of course I should be the one to do it. I probably never will.
This is an open message to all of the entrepreneurs who follow me. Those who follow me may now see why I get so pissed off when a new app comes out to post photos to Twitter or someone makes a fart app or Google wastes money building another social network. I get so angry because this is not what technology should be used for. Millions of people are affected by violent crimes every year and there’s an opportunity for us to provide a voice to those who are attacked when the sun goes down in back alleys and parking lots. One webcam with a 3G card can save someone’s life and we’re wasting our time making Twitter apps.
Why? Because Twitter apps are too easy. Sharing a photo of your food is not easier from a technical standpoint but it’s easier from an emotional standpoint. If you fail, a few less photos of someone’s breakfast are lost but, if you lose at AdamsBlock, thousands of people’s lives are at risk.
I don’t have the emotional capacity to take on AdamsBlock again but I want to help an entrepreneur. If you think this is something you can do, I’ll give you the entire tamale from IP to documents to domain names to contacts with law enforcement agencies. I’ll help you to succeed. Friends of mine know that I still have a hole in my heart where AdamsBlock was. The haters thought I was trying to profit from the pain of others but I don’t want any money. I Just want a company to be built around truly changing the world and not a social networking feature.
Do you have what it takes? I hope so because I sure don’t.
2,790 Results on Google for content and articles about AdamsBlock. Not bad for a $99 webcam on a Justin.TV page.