Solomon Thompson felt the frustration and helplessness well up in his throat as the policemen questioned him. A junior at the University of Pennsylvania, he didn’t have much time to spare. He frequently rode his bike to campus in the evenings, but on this particular night, a woman had been mugged in the neighborhood by a black man on a bike—someone that loosely fit Solomon’s appearance.
It took a half hour for the police to allow Solomon to continue on his way, but the experience was burned into his memory forever. “I knew that, when I grew up, I wanted to change the world,” he remembers. “I wanted to give people more control over their lives, and I wanted to help create a world where people’s success is based on their actions, not on their appearance.”
After reading the autobiographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who empowered people by bringing down the cost of computer power and eliminating the barriers to entry that kept businesses from competing in the marketplace, Solomon’s life mission expanded even further. He saw how women, minorities, disabled individuals, and even small businesses were at a disadvantage, and he wanted to do something about it. He became a crusader for change. Now the cofounder, President and CEO of Blue Collar Objects, a company that uses open source software to keep costs low but computing power high, Solomon has joined the ranks of these innovative game changers, empowering those who have something to offer with a platform upon which to share it.
Solomon launched the company with his partner, Eric Sedor, whom he met while working on a project together at IBM. They were traveling consultants helping Fortune 100 companies build software, and they both noted the stress of being on the road. The toll that current business practices and expectations have on families really hit home when Solomon came home from a business trip to find that his three year old son, whom he had taught to play Moonlight Sonata, no longer showed interest in the piano. “I found myself wondering, how might companies and families change if people were able to form teams across geographic expanses to get a job done?” he says. “We reasoned that where a person was located shouldn’t necessarily matter, as long as there was a methodology for organizing the work of the various team members.”
At the time, the cost of telecommuting services was dropping rapidly. Solomon and Eric dreamed of building a platform where companies could leverage the best minds from anywhere and minimize the compromise between quality of life and work. “It wasn’t about building a product, it was about building an ecosystem—an environment where people with gifts could contribute,” he explains. With this in mind, they launched Blue Collar Objects with the philosophy that the worth of an individual is not based on role. “Whether you’re a secretary or a CEO, it doesn’t matter—everybody has valuable inputs, and everybody should roll their sleeves up and get the job done,” Solomon points out. “We wanted to eliminate the notion of empty blue suits—people who look good and can market themselves, but who don’t really understand the technology or the work.” Thus, Blue Collar is all about value added—breaking the problem into small pieces, getting the client to prioritize, and delivering incremental pockets of value so that, when budgets get tight, the most important things are prioritized.
Blue Collar Objects was launched on March 13, 2000. Solomon left IBM first, and since that time, the two partners have wrestled with concepts, teams, and technology. The first piece of software they built failed, as well as the second and third, but they kept trying. “Part of our belief is, fail early,” Solomon says confidently. “We believe failure is essential to understanding how to do anything. Baby’s fail—they bump into things and burn themselves. We tried, failed, learned the lesson, and have been constantly evolving that way. We’re experts at this methodology of writing software by constantly doing retrospectives, looking at what went well, what didn’t, developing solutions, and then continuing on to the next sprint or iteration. This process assumes failure. You embrace it. You want transparency. You don’t want a culture where, if something goes wrong, people feel ashamed. You want a culture where people will plaster it up and see what happened so they don’t make the same mistakes again. We didn’t invent this way of thinking—the spirit of this approach is captured in the Agile Manifesto.”
Solomon’s approach to business boasts an element of bravery that certainly stems from his parents, who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1950s. His father had worked on both bicycles and houses in Jamaica, but the economy prompted the Thompsons to move to England, where he worked as a machinist. Shortly afterward, his mother happened to take a boat to America and met somebody named Arthur Fisher, who decided to sponsor her and her husband to come to America. “It was chance,” Solomon says.
Born in the Bronx, Solomon was the youngest of five children, and attended Catholic elementary school, followed by Bronx Science School. Music was sacred in their family, and his parents bought a used baby grand piano that everyone would gather around to sing. When Solomon was eight, a neighbor told them about an audition at the Lincoln Center, and he got the part. He then auditioned for the children’s chorus, which he got into and sang for until he was thirteen, at which time he started taking piano lessons. He ran track, practiced his music, played with friends, collected comics, saw ballets at the Lincoln Center where he sang, and expanded from the rich diversity that enlivened his days. His brother, eight years his senior, loved math and taught him calculus before he got into college, as well as a love of jazz.
Combined, the Thompsons couldn’t have been making more than $40,000 by the time they retired, but they filled their children’s lives with a sense of wonder that was just as strong as the values they instilled in them and the legacy they left. “They valued us—making sure we had an education,” Solomon emphasizes. “Every one of us graduated from college. They also valued music. We all took lessons of some sort, and we had the piano in the house. We had a minor income, and they chose to spend their money on music and education. As a family, we didn’t take vacations or eat out. Sneaking out to McDonalds was a big deal. They were always there for us. They taught us commitment. My dad would say, ‘The long road draws sweat, the shortcut draws blood.’”
Remembering his childhood, Solomon perhaps recalls most fondly the bridge of balsa wood that he and his father built together for a science competition in high school. The students were challenged to build the lightest bridge that could support the most weight. “My father explained things and gave me an intuitive understanding of forces just by talking about them,” Solomon remembers. “We got first place, and that gave me so much pride, because many of the students I was competing against had college-educated parents to help them. My parents didn’t even graduate from high school, but he brought a self-taught value and meaning to the table that helped show me what was truly important in life.”
Solomon’s first job was as a summer camp counselor. Another summer, he worked for Manufacturers Hanover Bank, where he was a waiter in the lunchroom. He then attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed an awareness of politics and history that deepened his understanding of the world even further.
After graduating, Solomon began working as a programmer for Grumman Aerospace, which he developed a furious passion for computers. Expanding upon that passion, he took several courses at City College in New York on operating systems. He stayed on to pursue his master’s and also took a job at the Department of Corrections in New York City, doing database work while going to school at night. “I would study on the train, get to work, go to school, do musical stuff on the side, and make sure that every minute was accounted for,” he recalls. After he graduated from that program, he went to work for IBM, where he stayed for 10 years.
While at IBM, Solomon did something he had never done before—he stood up to, and yelled at, someone in the workplace who cursed at him. “Before that, I would express my position but would always subdue my true feelings in the name of preserving the peace,” he explains. “But to stand up for what I believed in and what I thought was right, aggressively—that was truly liberating. It led me to realize I was showing a different face to each context I would enter, whether it was with my parents, my friends, or the workplace. I would talk to whomever in the appropriate vernacular. I developed the school face, the work face. It wasn’t clear who I was because I never had a desire to win an argument. But that breakthrough led me to the realization that conflict is good. It’s about idea Darwinism, and how that helps the world to evolve. I want the best ideas to survive, but that means those ideas have to get out in the world.”
Venturing forth and creating Blue Collar Objects is one such idea. “It wasn’t so much an entrepreneurial spirit that I had, as a need to have the opportunity to fail and learn—an opportunity to take control of my future,” Solomon says, remembering that night back in college when the police stopped him because of the way he looked. “Starting the business was about having a vision of wanting to change the world. I didn’t want to be in a protective cocoon where I couldn’t be creative, or invest in things, or fail. In order to change the world, you have to be willing to believe with every fiber of your being in what you’re doing and talk truth to power.”
Today, Blue Collar Objects has developed a concrete product and a clear vision, and that product and vision is BlueJean Time, a piece of software that will facilitate organizing the Work of a Generation. With this focus, Solomon and his team are proving themselves in anticipation of the negotiating table, where they might at some point consider accepting venture funding. “We have an altruistic vision—we want to do good, and don’t want our business model to be driven solely by the bottom line,” he points out. “We need to achieve a couple more things before we accept external money and the strings it’s inevitably attached to. From a values perspective, we always put people first, and from an ethics perspective, we always put ourselves to the Washington Post Test—if what we’re doing were to show up on the cover of the newspaper, would we be cool with it? We make sure to always pass that test.”
After leaving IBM and starting the company in March of 2000, Solomon calculated that the family would run out of money by September of that year. By June, it was clear none of their product ideas were going to work, so he took on a consulting gig. He and his wife, Jean, both knew how to write code, and their friends would come over and discuss business and life. They knew they wanted to eventually come back to the product concept, but in DC, companies must be more established to attract investment. So they decided to focus on establishing themselves, building a reputation, securing a cash flow, and revisiting the product idea later.
Today, Solomon’s wife, Jean, is the CFO of Blue Collar Objects, and Eric serves as the Chief Technology Officer. Now a team of between 30 and 40, Solomon measures the company’s success in impact. “Our vision is to organize the work of a generation, and our mission is to empower leaders to, very simply, organize the work of distributed teams,” says Solomon. “At a time when technology is being used to communicate with and organize people all over the world, the Blue Collar team is focused on the science of work. Our core competence is about understanding how to get things done and the pros and cons of different kinds of collaboration. Additionally, we understand the problem of context management, or the need for this generation to be able to manage family life, work life, and the many other contexts that demand its time. With today’s increasingly transparent patterns of relating to one another via Facebook and Instagram, we see that work requires a need for privacy, security, and the protection of intellectual property. With this in mind, we build our tools around finding the right balance between the social aspects used to keep team members engaged, the privacy aspects to make sure collaboration is done securely, and the need to switch seamlessly between different contexts. What we do is more than a science; it’s an art.”
In addition to the wisdom of crowds, which draws upon the knowledge base of many to fill in individual blind spots and evolve effective approaches, Solomon’s leadership style rests upon a bedrock of self knowledge. Just as Bill Gates would take a week away each year to read and reflect on the best route forward, Solomon has gone on similar retreats twice a year for the last five years. On these retreats, he reflects on four dimensions of life: family, business, community, and self. What went well and what hasn’t? “It’s easy for me to lose myself in all of these dimensions, so separating them out and looking at them retrospectively is especially helpful,” he points out.
Another cornerstone of his approach is giving back, as demonstrated when he and several friends started an organization called College Tribe, which provides scholarships to help young black boys pursue their college educations. Blue Collar Objects has also donated their services to the Fairfax County Youth Football League to help better organize recruitment and team functioning.
“I’m so amazed at how blessed I’ve been in so many respects,” Solomon marvels today. “I never dreamed we’d live in the house we live in now. I never dreamed we’d run a company. The ability to be in a controlling position in an organization that’s trying to do good is a dream I never had that came true. But what I’m most proud of, is working to change the image of black people. As human beings, we’re hardwired to stereotype, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It helps us to make quick decisions and survive. But the image of black people as either entertainers or criminals needs to change, and I’m proud to contribute to a world where people are judged by their actions, not by their appearances.”
In advising young entrepreneurs entering the workforce today, Solomon urges them to become excellent at something—what that something is, is up to them. “My son is consistently staying up till 3 am working on music, and he’s getting better and better,” he says. “He’s learning what it takes to be great at something. Becoming really good at something provides you a pathway to become good at anything. Today, with the United States operating on a global scale and competing with India and China, the lowest cost, best value option ends up getting the work, and if you’re not excellent at something, you won’t get picked. Business is becoming less and less about relationships, and more about the value added. Needs will shift and change, but real excellence will always be in demand.”
In this pursuit of excellence, one achieves not only success, but also an unparalleled sense of freedom—one that unleashes the soul of the crusader as he or she seeks to free others from the societal blockades that hold them back. “It’s a commitment to never say die,” Solomon emphasizes. “It’s the commitment that says, this thing is going to succeed. That’s how you change the world.”
%201.svg){kind=small}
