Interview: Mike Rundle
I am going to try to start doing regular interviews (hopefully once a week, probably more like 2-3 a month though). My first interviewee is Mike Rundle. He’s the chief design officer over the 9rules Network. He also writes at his own blog.
I had planned on posting this interview when I released my new design, but I think what Mike has to say is too good to keep to myself. And my design is going to take a little longer than I anticipated because I am trying to pay much closer attention to detail than I have in the past.
Anyways, here’s the interview with Mike Rundle, CDO of 9rules:
1. A quick biography - What’s your name? What college did you attend? What was your major? What are you doing now?
I’m Mike Rundle, and I graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology last February (couple months early!) with a BS in Information Technology and a minor in Mass Communications. After college I did a quick stint at a technology consulting firm in New Jersey, but then left after a few short months to work on my own client work (www.businesslogs.com) full-time. While doing client work to pay the bills, this past summer my partners and I put together a new internet startup called 9rules (www.9rules.com) which aims to bring more visibility to the independent web by bringing the best bloggers in the world together under one roof.
Right now I work from my apartment in Rochester, NY, but in the Spring my girlfriend and I are moving back down to Raleigh, NC where we spent this past summer once I left New Jersey. She’s taking a software engineering position at IBM while I bask in the warm glow of the Southern sun and work from our new place.
2. How did you make money in college? A ‘real’ job or did you find money other ways?
Hmm, well I’ve got a Platinum credit card that still needs some tender loving attention 
Like most college students I used my credit card a lot when times were tight, but now I’ve learned my lesson and am slowly paying it off. I always figured that once I had a “steady full-time job” after college I could just use the paychecks to pay off the debt, but that plan took a small hiatus when I chose to go the self-employed route where the term “steady paycheck” is more of an oxymoron than a promise.
RIT is a co-op school which means most programs (including mine) require you to do 3-5 blocks of paid internships at companies in order to graduate. Information technology, my major, requires 3 blocks, so those 9 months of work helped pay the bills. My first co-op was at a local company where I designed their new website, my second co-op was at a consulting firm in Chicago (www.streams.com) where I learned the ropes of client work, and my third and final co-op was at Northrop Grumman in Virginia (www.northropgrumman.com) where I designed the training application used to teach US military forces how to use missile defense software. Nobody plans on getting into government work, but the pay is wonderful 
My senior year at RIT I got more into my own client work which was nice because when you get paid for doing what you love you just can’t beat it.
3. You’re the Chief Design Officer (CDO) at 9rules, what else do you do? Is all your energy focused on 9rules or do you work on other projects? What’s your typical day like?
Man, no days are typical when you work from home! Some days I’m up at 7am to finish up client work before a tight deadline, and other days I wake up in time for lunch if I’m not too busy. Unfortunately those “wake up at lunch” days haven’t happened recently because many projects are getting finished up at once, so I take what I can get.
This past summer my time was split 90% for client work and about 10% for 9rules, but slowly it’s been shifting more towards 9rules as we work more on new features and business development. Right now it’s about 75% client work and 25% 9rules, but I hope in 3-4 months for it to be in favor of 9rules once some of our plans are set in motion.
The client work I do is pretty broad in scope — the Business Logs team and I take on projects ranging from straight branding work, to internal communication consulting, to user interface design. We’ve been really fortunate to work with some great clients so in that respect it’s been a pleasure doing the consulting thing on my own. The wrong clients can really drop your morale, so to steal a phrase from Gladwell’s “Blink”, make sure you thin slice your clients and go with your gut if you think a company might not be a good fit. Sometimes turning down a project and working at McDonald’s is better than dealing with a client who might ruin your life.
4. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Still working on 9rules? Retired ;)?
As with any would-be entrepreneur or business owner, you think about the future all the time because starting up a company is one of the best ways to make the future actually happen the way you envision it. Our plans for 9rules extend way beyond what people see right now, so maybe in five years 9rules will be looked at the way C|Net or IDG is looked at so who knows
I don’t think any amount of money could make me retire or stop doing what I love, in fact it would just drive me to take on projects that let me be a bit more creative. Designing interfaces and information is what I would do even if I wasn’t getting paid for it, so there’s no way I would stop doing that even if I didn’t need the money.
5. What about entrepreneurship excites you? What about it challenges you?
The thing that excites me most about running a company is that I am in *total* control over the outcome. If 9rules is a success it’s because my partners and I made it that way, and if it fails, it’s because we failed ourselves. A company cannot be turned into a success by itself, it takes hard work from the people who thought up the idea and that really keeps me going. When I was at other jobs and I had bosses who might not have been making good decisions, I always wished they would just take my advice and do what I wanted to do since I believed it was a better way. Now, I run my own company, so every decision I make is put into action immediately and I can see the results — I can see if it was the right decision or not.
The challenge in running a company lies in seeing what others cannot see. My partners and I have a vision for 9rules, but the path to reach our goals has never been blazed before nor can it really be described completely. It’s as if our choices and decisions illuminate sections of a road, and then we step forward and make another decision to see if it was the right one or not. Remember the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books where you had to pick certain outcomes to see at the end of the book if you chose the right ones? That’s exactly what running a company is like — the decisions you make every single day grow exponentially in importance over the course of the company’s lifetime, but you don’t know which choices are the important ones until you can look back and see things clearly.
6. If you were to give a freshman in college some advice, what would it be?
I’d tell him/her to figure out where they want to be a year after college and then work backwards from that goal. I was lucky — early on in college I figured out that I wanted to work on the web so I spent a lot of time writing weblog entries, commenting on hundreds of weblogs, and cold-emailing tons of “famous” people so they would notice me. Some friends of mine think that big client projects or amazing jobs will just fall into their laps and that is extremely far from the truth. College freshman have a ton of abundant time since the classes aren’t challenging off the bat, so be productive and make or do something that will help your career.
7. If you weren’t working on 9rules right now, what “big” company would you want to work at?
DesignworksUSA (www.designworksusa.com) without a doubt. They are the BMW-owned design firm in Southern California responsible for the Z4, the X5, and the Rolls-Royce Phantom. Drooooool
8. Any other words of advice for people interested in blogging, entrepreneurship, etc?
Well the biggest thing I can stress is that it takes a lot of hard work: fame and popularity on the web cannot be achieved overnight, or even over 60 nights. Being driven is the only sure-fire way to get your foot in the door, hell, I had to cold-email 50 design firms in Chicago just to find a job that got me out there and started me off where I needed to be. Figure out where you want to be, then take the necessary steps to get you there, and don’t look back. Always move forward and remember that business is business — hard decisions need to be made, and you’ll be better off making them than sitting around wishing you had.
Thanks for the interview Ben!
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Awesome interview… more than I ever knew about Rundle. Great work Ben, you got him to speak up!