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For those eager to put in 23 hours a day to develop the newestgroundbreaking technology, remember: It's easier whenyou're single. "It's not exactly the life for thenewlywed," jokes Yonald Chery, founder and chief technologyofficer of Boston start-up Virtual Ink Corp. Not only did the33-year-old get hitched last summer-just when the company had begunramping up production of its premiere product, a compact, mobiledevice called Mimio that's used to record information writtenor drawn on a whiteboard and save it on your PC-he's stillworking on his doctorate in VLSI CAD (microchip reliabilityanalysis) from MIT.
Chery's wife "intensely" wants him to finish hisdissertation. But when this is your calling-as the engineering buffhas known since he attended an entrepreneurship in engineeringseminar his freshman year in college-putting business on hold isnot an option. And since founding the company three years ago as afrustrated teaching assistant who spent too much time rescuingstudents with incorrectly transcribed whiteboard notes, he'sthankful he didn't.
"From an engineering background, [bringing Mimio to market]is very much in line with what I hoped to do in terms of affectingpeople's lives and applying technology for the good ofhumanity," says Chery. And he did it with only $10,000 earnedafter placing first runner-up in MIT's Sloane School ofManagement 1997 50K Entrepreneurship Competition, where henetworked with potential investors and invited them to pay a visitto his dorm room "office."
With sales thousands of times greater than what they were atlaunch, Virtual Ink and its 100-plus employees are thriving. Hestill has over 20 patents pending, and recruiting is difficult, buttake it from Chery: "There's no wrong way to do things,except that your team needs to communicate well."
