Starting Up the Start-Up

Do you know who Kim Linehan is? Well, back in 1981 she held the world record in the Women's 1500-meter freestyle. According to her coach, Paul Bergen, the then-18-year-old was the leading amateur woman distance swimmer in the world. "Kim does endless exercises and swims 7 to 12 miles a day. The hardest part of her regimen? 'Getting in the water,' she says."

Starting up a new venture is a lot like that. Whether it's a brand new venture being pulled out of the ground for the first time by its creators; or (like us) a new venture of an already-established organization. I'm not sure which is more difficult,
but I think we'd all agree that both start-up situations have its challenges... the greatest of which may be "getting in the water"!

Here at Intermountain we're starting up the start-up process of putting our vision into a tangible form... our vision of how we'll change the world. While Intermountain is not a new organization, this is a new venture...one with great purpose.

We're excited and we're scared all at the same time... as it should be. Having been in business for myself for more than twenty years providing start-up capital to early stage technology companies, I believe that if you aren't scared at least a little bit, you're crazy. Either you're too crazy to admit that you're naive, or too naive to admit that you have to be crazy to pull this off! Either way, you're probably not going to be successful if a healthy fear is not part of the process.

In her manifesto at ChangeThis.com titled "Cherry Bombs: A Supplemental Kit To Radical Careering," Sally Hogshead writes this about goals, "Find a goal that scares the s_ _ _ out of you. There's only one ground rule: your goal has to expose yourself to a very real chance of failure. It has to be big and important enough to make you proclaim a purpose for your life. If it's comfortable, it's not big enough."

So here at Intermountain, our goal is to change the world for young children who are under terrible distress caused by complex emotional trauma. We are setting out on this venture with three main focuses:

* Accelerate Knowledge: (1) Provide a diverse and dynamic curriculum for those people who are providing care for these kids, in order to help them be more successful in their families, and give the children a new hope and a new future. (2) Establish a forum of national-level training for professionals who help heal these kids and families.

* Advance Awareness: Be a voice for these children that have no voice, raising awareness and action on their behalf.

* Affect change through public policy: For the purpose of influencing better care and better outcomes for these children, we will "disturb the peace" among legislators who make public policy affecting child victims of complex emotional trauma.

The purpose of this weblog is to chronicle the journey of this start-up; share our mistakes and successes; and solicit your feedback, help, encouragement, and support.

Please contact us anytime.