I learned this the hard way 2 years ago while going through my divorce with my wife. We had both built up our web app development business over 8 years. Income was 120-150K. But without "both" of us working the hours....it soon wasn't worth anything.
I was able to liquidate the clients for 5K.
This was due to poor planning, documentation of process and of course a divorce. (so communication was somewhat an issue).
You would really need to define the business...every nut and bolt...and module that drives it. Then the processes that go with it.
Then if you could quantify that to someone, and show how it makes money when operated correctly you might be able to get some money squeezed out of it for grad school.
The likelihood you will get lump sum is small...but more like you could get a residual with maybe a balloon.
Let me know if you need help packaging it up. I'm helping my current employer with this [email protected]
I use Jungle Disk with my Amazon S3. Jungle disk has a mapped network drive directly bound to the Amazon S3 bucket of choice.
When I download I can choose to download and / or drag to my jungle disk cloud drive. Thus bypassing my local store and going straight to the cloud.
I agree with what your saying. I think web applications should allow me to use the cloud storage of my choice to store all my application settings and data.
Some startups were done more as side projects...and just never got the full dedication.
A couple startups were solo endeavors...quit jobs to run...ran up credit cards.
Still paying 20K from the last one.....
No regrets. Best education I could ever have.