FOUNDER SERIES: SCOTT PAUL: How I founded (and exited) three companies and became an angel investor.

I'VE BEEN DOING STARTUPS FOR ABOUT 10 YEARS NOW.

I was always entrepreneurial--even when I was a teenager living in California I started a business selling food storage during the mania that was Y2K. I was going around in-person and online selling food, and I was making way more than my high school friends at the time.

But I was young and didn't stick with it. I spent the next 10 years working for other people and other startups--learning what I liked and didn't like about their leadership style, their ideas, and the way they did things. One of the coolest companies I worked for during that time was a startup that put RC helicopters up in the air with cameras on them--this was before drones. I also opened climbing gyms--Momentum was a family business.

As a teenager, I loved skiing at Snowbird so I moved to Utah and thought I would become a ski bum. Consequently, I wound up at utah.com selling ad space to hotels across Utah while I worked on my MBA at the University of Utah. It was there that I ended up creating my first business.

MY FIRST EXIT WAS A COMPLETE ACCIDENT

I should mention that my first business was not my first business. Over a period of five years, I probably tried five other things that failed. Even the RC helicopter business was a complete disaster, they'd crash every time we threw them up in the air and we'd lose $10,000. And Momentum? To this day, climbing gyms are a hard business.

But while I was in grad school I finally had an idea I thought would work. The iPad had just come out and I wanted to put them in hotels to display information. I went around showing the software I had created to all these hotel owners, and for the most part they liked it, but what they really loved was the case on my iPad.

A friend who made motorcycle parts made me a metal enclosure for the demo--it could lock the iPad down in the lobby of a hotel, and the hotels loved it. So I bought ipadenclosures.com (now defunct), put a photo of the case on there, and they started selling.

I didn't even have to buy ads or anything. It was just the right time and the SEO worked. Of course, the whole company was poorly managed--I had never been the CEO of a company before--but we had enough sales to fumble through everything and because we were in the B2B space we had high enough margins to make it work.

I spent my time at the U making the website and nailing down the supply chain for my company. Within a few years, I had 30 people working for me and we were shipping these iPad cases to almost every company in the world. It was accidental and it was luck--which is what most entrepreneurship is, by the way.

In another bout of luck, I got a letter from a private...