what happens when life ends and work begins
Journal - Photographs - About
...February
Tough Crowd 01/30/00 Overheard: "The demo is great, but the financials have to be beefed up a bit." No one said this would be easy, I should have listened.
Passed 01/29/00 The demo went well, technically at least. Ben and I had one bug that reared its head just 20 minutes before the showing and another that emerged during the showing but both were overcome easily.
Pie 01/28/00 Deciding initial holding of a company is such an odd thing when you think about it. Did the founders of Apple decide how much stock each got or what price they wanted to offer options at? I doubt it... Tonight we divided up the company and it was relatively painless.
Voodoo 01/28/00 Lane is using voodoo magic to pop my Knee-Cap out of place. That's it, I quit! (no, not really.)
Deadline 01/27/00 Saturday is the first "all-hands" meeting. We're showing a super-alpha version of the ********* to a couple of investors type and also hoping to convince a few stragglers to join us. We have forty eight hours to pretend the ********* is perfect, this shouldnt be a problem.
Codebase Principles 01/25/00 There's a certain point, after coding for some time, that you need a breakthrough, because if you dont have a breakthrough it's over. We had a breakthrough.
Sales Report 01/23/00 Lane: "No, we dont sell anything. No it's not done. No, no, look. It's an internet startup we dont have anything!"
Compete 01/22/00 Yesterday Lane and Courtney sent off our Executive Summary to a VC competetion that I cant currently remember the name of. It's connected to SXSW. The deadline was pushed back a few days which makes me think they didnt have many entries, which makes me think that's good for us.
Viva la Morning 01/21/00 All-nighter #1.
Tight Quarters 01/19/00 Lane and Courtney arrived today with all of their stuff. Formula for stress: five people living in a two bedroom house with one bathroom. It will be fine, just like dorm life.
Caffeine 01/19/00 Having given away my coffee machine to someone in DC, the usual steady stream of espresso is not an option. It may be the beverage of the 80's computer geek, but I prefer Jolt over Mt. Dew.
Flow Chart 01/18/00 A couple nights ago I drew up a very brief flow chart for our site. One of the top level options is "Stuff we forgot," I'm leaving room. The G3 upgrade card arrived today but it doesn't work. Instead of tinkering with it, I'm using a crappy machine. No time to waste fixing machines.
Package! 01/17/99 The first of our online orders has arrived: ram for Ben's iBook. Fun thing about startups: If you can somehow forget the fact that you've paid for the stuff on your credit card, it's fun to get lots of hardware in the mail! Actually Lane paid for this stuff. There's more on the way.
Rooting 01/17/99 I spoke to AJ, an old friend from school today and he mentioned that some of my classmates are "rooting for [us]." It seemed odd to me at first, the idea of people who have taken a special sort of interest in this venture succeeding, but when I thought more about it I realized that not many people actually do give it a shot. The odds of success are very slim. It's comforting to know there's people out there who want to see you succeed just to succeed and not for some gleeming IPO. It's 5:00am: bedtime.
Midnight 01/16/00 It's 1:00am and just finished writing out some flowcharts. The best thing about owning/working for your own company is that you can work at any hour you want and still take breaks when needed.
Meeting 01/15/00 We had our first meeting in the new "office." There's now a whiteboard full of stuff to do in the next 15 days including but not limited to 1,001 mockups to be done by one Mr. Bryan Boyer. As my old boss would say, "wheeeeeeeeee."
Desks & Cable 01/14/00 Today we built the desks, put up two huge white boards, set up a router (currently only routing a 56k modem [ick!]) and laid some cable (very poorly). We also ordered lots of computer parts but had quite a hard time finding wrist guards online. Big whiteboards are good.
Garage Office 01/13/00 We arrived in Austin on the night of the 12th, as scheduled. Unpacked the next day (much easier than packing) and went desk, chair, and computer shopping. Note: cheap computers will do for now.
Driving 01/11/00 We left at 7:00am, not bad. After having learned hwo to drive stick just the night before, rush hour traffic was quite... interesting. 15 hours of driving wasnt so bad with a minidisc, NPR, and a microphone. Talking to myself passed the hours rather quickly.
Packing 01/09/00 Packed half of my stuff, more packing tomorrow. We're picking up the truck monday morning (Ben's credit permitting) and packing it. The drive to Austin is 28hrs according to mapquest. Leaving: Tuesday morning 6am.