So many books talk about how entrepreneurs did this or did that, but it's all about the team. I didn't do jack compared to my counterparts. I found a few super motivated kids my age who wanted to join in on the business venture, and we split the work out depending on where our skill sets were. I did business, sales, marketing, and intermediate level tech support. Alan was a hardcore techy. Tyler filled in for both me and Alan. This brings me to my next lesson from when I supposedly ran a business back when I was 13: Your team matters more than you do. Make them happy, and they'll save you when you need them most.

Mishap #1: (4 months in business, 300 customers) I was driving down the freeway with my family on a rainy day in July. We were driving up the Jersey Coast, going to our next vacation destination. All of my responsibilities were temporarily designated to one of my co-founders, Tyler, and I received a terrible phone call:

"Hey umm... our servers are down! All of our customers are bitching at us!"

Oh. Bloody. Hell. We had downtime for the next 48 hours and eventually found out that one of our customers, once again, was phishing. In other words, somebody with an account on our primary machine was pretending to be PayPal and sent out fake emails. All of this from OUR server. This cost the company a few hundred dollars in revenue and thousands more in potential business, but it was a good lesson that I learned young. a) invest in security, b) figure out ways to get your customers online if such a problem ever happened, c) compensate them for having suffered through your stupidity, and d) be transparent and honest as to what happened. We failed to do all of the above when we needed to. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes. We ended up giving out heavily discounted services and emailing updates to customers when they suffered through our careless mistakes.

Mishap #2: (9 months in business, 700 customers) I was in a hotel room on December 31st a few years ago. It was 11:59 and 15 seconds (+/- 10 seconds) and suddenly I get a phone call. Of course, another problem while I'm trying to enjoy my vacation. Co-founder Tyler tells me that some f**khead hacked into all of our servers and wiped off our clients' accounts. Not. Funny. Except this time, we learned from our mistakes. My other co-founder, Alan, was also a nerdy Asian. He was brilliant. An absolute genius. He found out what happened and he patched the problems up within 15 minutes by reverting to our backup machines. Since this was new years, nobody was looking. We were so fast with getting things back online that not a single customer sent us a support ticket. This brings me to my next super important lesson: Always critique yourself and learn from your mistakes. If something terrible happens, (such as if some dickhead deletes all of your customers' accounts,) then learn. Figure out what happened, patch it up, and promise that it'll never ever happen again in the future. And if somehow it does, you're going to lose business.

More to come on my stories from when I was a stupid, arrogant, teenage entrepreneur!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

Some people thought there wasn't another way to hate AT&T more than we already do... well, AT&T did it again. I have an iPhone, as you probably know. I love my iPhone. I love my Apple products, but I despise AT&T for their terrible service, stupid customer service reps, and now this problem:

In a nutshell, they disabled my internet. I'm paying for unlimited internet, yet throughout the day, I've been being charged as if I didn't have that plan. In order words, my iPhone automatically billed me for over $50 today for internet related charges only. According to the customer rep I'm speaking to now, this problem happened to everybody with an iPhone. This is just a terrible excuse from a terrible company, and I'm going to blog about it. If they wanted to avoid bad word of mouth from this, they would offer every iPhone customer with a free month of internet or something among those lines.

My two cents: Avoid AT&T! Tell everybody you know how terrible they are!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

Word in the blogosphere is that T-Mobile is blocking Twitter for all customers... and of course, the customers aren't happy. Firstly, what could have caused this?

T-Mobile CLAIMS that Twitter isn't an authorized third party service, as noted below:

"T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate “… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion.” Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.”

Some believe that T-Mobile considers Twitter a small startup, and that's the reason why they're blocking the service. Sounds more like a cover-up for the truth.
However, my original thought was that Twitter caused a substantial traffic load. The passionate Twitter users would post an update of where they are and what they're doing every half hour. These passionate users are friends with hundreds of other Twitter users, so there are so many messages going back and forth. Over the course of several months, it has been adding up, and T-Mobile wants to save money from this overload.

So what does this mean to the company?

1) Bad: Passionate Twitter users aren't only go leave T-Mobile in favor of a better service, but they'll also make word known in the blogosphere that T-Mobile is anti third party services. There's an exponential negative effect here because T-Mobile loses customers while those customers prevent prospective customers from signing up with them. All of this for just a few cents saved from less traffic?

2) Maybe it was a good move, for all we know. Maybe there was some deep security threat, or the price of allowing Twitter users on the network was too high. Beats me.

Either way, it's important for big companies to keep in mind that any change they make, no matter how *minor* it may seem, may potentially hold a significant impact for the company, or more importantly, customer loyalty.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Woowee, word around the blogosphere is that BlogNation is dead! And I thought Sam secured extra funding and promised to pay all the debt he owed? When you screw up a company, not only do you lose valuable time and money, but your reputation is in need of total repair if there are accusations of you not paying your employees accordingly.

Doesn't look like Mr. CEO, Sam Sethi will have much luck with getting funding for his next company. Mr. CEO, I know you're reading this. Why not share your part of the story and I can post it for the world to see?

As you might have already read, BlogNation really got dicked over today when the US editor Oliver Starr posted a public letter of resignation on the front page of the blog he was resigning from. It talked about how the CEO of BlogNation, Sam Sethi, wasn't paying his people anything.

The validity of his claims are irrelevant. He's gone, the world now thinks that Sam Sethi is a terrible CEO and shady person to do business with. What's Sam Sethi to do?

1) First off, Mr. CEO needs to take a stand. He needs to openly discuss the situation at hand and either make a full blown apology that discusses in detail why he hasn't paid, or deny it in its entirety and possibly provide proof that he did in fact pay and that Oliver Starr is just trying to screw him over. Either way, Mr. CEO needs to say something to the world, or else people will take his silence as a guilty confession.

2) Mr. CEO needs to make sure the other editors are happy. Discuss openly with the other editors what happened and how to assure that such a thing won't happen again. If they too start posting open letters of resignation, BlogNation might as well just pull the plug.

3) Or the best of the solutions... PAY YOUR EMPLOYEES AS YOU PROMISED!!!

On another note, after TechCrunch posted Oliver Starr's letter, an editor from BlogNation China posted a comment:

Ladies and gentlemen –

1. We express our concern about Oliver deciding to air his own concerns on blognation.

2. Readers may wish to note that reports about blognation on TechCrunch may contain bias. It most certainly is not the “neutral point of view” that we expect from the Wikipedia.

3. As part of the blognation team we are experiencing difficultings in launching and in being with a new startup. Our determination to establish the brand and to aim for victory after victory, however, remains unchanged and will remain unchanged.

4. Quite a bit of content on blognation (and blognation China at that) are unique, as we have good roots in our community. We grow with the community.

5. Please rest assured that blognation (and in particular blognation China) will continue to provide you with news every day of the week like we have been doing for the past two months.

I do realize that some of you have different opinions. We will respect each other’s opinions knowing that responsible freedom of speech is a good thing.

Your support is appreciated.

Best regards,
David Feng
Editor, blognation China
http://cn.blognation.com

I'm sure you've already found some flaws in the above comment. This David Feng is giving the absolute lamest excuses for Mr. CEO's problems. TechCrunch readers are definitely biased, but the post itself didn't have so much. Just cause you're a startup doesn't excuse you from paying employees you've promised to pay. If they were under an equity agreement or barter, that's different.

Unfortunately for Oliver, I'm not sure if there's much legal recourse for him. He didn't sign a contract with his employee which leaves him utterly screwed. I'm sure he'll learn for next time. as for Mr. CEO, best of luck.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

From Valleywag: How is it that major retailers aren't prepared for black friday and cyber monday? Sears.com went down after having "high volume," but that's just sad, considering that this weekend was huge for sales.

Not only should they be prepared for a huge traffic spike, but they definitely should embrace internet sales more. Brian Solis suggested that internet retailers make huge sales that happen from midnight until 5AM on "Cyber Monday" - only problem being, major retailers are scared that it'll take away from their retail sales. While the excuse is to be expected and somewhat understandable, there are plenty of people like me (and Brian) who wouldn't bother waiting on line at such an early time Friday morning just to save some money. If we could buy from the comfort of our own homes, that would be amazing. Not to mention, I'm much more compelled to add things to my shopping cart if all I need to do is click.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Most of you have probably heard about the terrible oil spill that happened in the San Francisco Bay last week. It's terrible - wildlife is dying, and over 1,500 people are working around the clock to clean this mess up.

Everybody is dwelling on the stupid Cosco Bussan container ship that caused this problem. Afterall, it's probably one or two dumbass human beings who led to this hapening, right? Let's look at the bright side:

For all we know, this may bring about change in how things are done in the future. We'll be better prepared for future oil spills. People who feel passionate about fixing this will try to bring about permanent change in policy. If an oil spill 10X worse is to happen a year from now, we'll be much more prepared because of this one event.

This relates to the Rackspace.com dilemma below. The downtime Rackspace experienced happened because of one dumbass driver who crashed his truck. I don't see any pluses to this situation, but if Rackspace saw this downtime in its earlier days, it could have prepped itself for when the company grew to the large scale it is today.

With my hosting company three summers ago, we had a terrible DDOS attack that put offline a few thousand websites. We lost clients, we lost money, and we were left with a tarnished reputation... but hey, we learned from this. We made everything secure for if this was to happen in the future. We grew 1000% in the next few months, we were sure to spend time patching up all of our customers' machines, and not a single customer experienced a security related problem.

So stop dwelling on the past if you can't go back... there might be a positive benefit for all you know!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

I'm reporting live from a congressional hearing on Energy Independence and Global Warming! The first two speakers were amazing at presenting a case to fight off global warming and energy dependency. Unfortunately, I was pretty unsatisfied with our third speaker. Throughout the conference, we were taught about public speaking. We were taught the art of persuasion. We were taught about choosing good representatives to present our case to political leaders. Yet somehow, a school girl from Alaska came to the Capitol steps unprepared. Everybody in the room felt so nervous as she spoke. Simply put, her arguement was mostly compromised of words such as "like" and "ummm" and "uhhh..." After a few minutes of terrible and unmotivating speaking, she broke down in tears. She couldn't get her grip together and there was an utter silence for a good 15 seconds before everybody applauded her in support. Then another 15 seconds go by, and she's back to her terrible public speaking.

LIVE from today's rally at the Capitol - Credit to SRManitou

When trying to convince government (or business) to take action, it's important to concentrate on what THEY want. This third speaker made the issue limited to her small town in Alaska. If I remember correctly, the speaker was referring to a town with a population of under 400 people. Sure, I sympathize with her. But for her to come to a congressional hearing unprepared? That just makes EVERYBODY look bad. Fine. She's just a college student trying to act on an issue important to her. To silence the criticisms I see coming, I'll give her an A for effort. More to come...

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Serverbeach was awesome enough to contact me just an hour after my blog post below. Here's what the community evangelist, Charnell Pugsley wrote to me:

The current situation: All our guys are out there now doing nothing but bringing servers online and the power is stable.

Within the next few days, we will be investigating what's taken place and coming up with a solution to keep it from happening again. We'll be following up with all of our customers in the Virginia data center with an official explanation soon.

... and then provided me my compensation in the form of credit to future invoices. Not bad, considering I didn't have to do anything more than just write this blog post and email her!

In any case, this is way better customer support than most I've seen in the past. When shit hits the fan, it's often difficult to get compensation let alone receive a reply from any company representatives.

Well, cheers to ServerBeach! I'll continue to be a loyal customer :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.