Tech Crunch
I’m out in San Francisco today for the Tech Crunch Party at August Capital. I’ve been instructed to take copious pictures. I’ll try to get them Flickred in a short time period and report back. I’m staying in Palo Alto and leaving Saturday night, should anyone else be interested in meeting up at some point.
A friend said it shows my dedication to my startup that I’m willing to spend something like 18 hours in travel time in 2 days just to pass out some business cards. I think it shows, more than anything, my optimism. As we move toward demo day, which is now in 2 short weeks, I’m feeling pretty good about the progress we’ve made in the last two months.
I’m not really worrying too much about demoing. I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to show off yet. I might actually end up using Power Point, if I can get them to lift the YCombinator ban on those. I’m not really a fan of slideshows, but I think I have a really good idea as to how to use it effectively in this instance.
In fact, I’m not really worried about anything. That’s one area in which my poker experience has truly helped me. I’m able to deal with uncertainty. That is, quite possibly, the hardest thing about a startup. Everything is up in the air. Right now, we don’t know for sure if massive amounts of people will like our product. We don’t know where the money necessary to pay the company’s bills will come from in a few months. We don’t know where we will be headquartered after August. We don’t know, even if we figure those things out, how many employees we’ll need or where we’ll get them from. If we catch on, we don’t know how we’ll deal with scaling. We have nothing but educated guesses and thousands of lines of code at this point.
But I’m used to making a living from a game that, even if played perfectly, can return zero income for months, so none of the above really bothers me. I feel like our idea, or at least some permutation of it, will catch on, and when that happens the rest will fall into place. If people want what we’re making the other problems are all solvable. And if they don’t, that too is a problem that, with effort, can be fixed.
My poker career has also given me financial stability, which I think is a huge asset. I remember asking Greg McAdoo from Sequoia what he thought about founders cashing out a little during financing rounds and he seemed pretty against it. His logic was that if someone was confident in their company, why would they want to sell more of it?
I think the answer is financial stability. A large part of the reason I’m so positive about my company is the fact that I don’t have to worry about where the rent check will come from. I don’t have to worry about how I’ll put gas in my car or food on my table. I could even pay the company’s bills and my considerable rent out of pocket if I had to for quite some time. I’m far from wealthy, so I’m still definitely motivated, but I’m not overly concerned about money. And that lets me worry more about building something people want.
I personally don’t want to cash out any of my company because I don’t need the money. Any founder who is financially stable and still wants to cash out I’d be leery of as an investor. But for your average broke MIT grad trying to start the next Facebook, I think a little financial stability would be a huge benefit. But then, I only have a slight amount of experience, and only on one side of the investor/founder relationship, so take that for what it’s worth.
Anyway, I look forward to this evening. I’ve been reading Tech Crunch for quite some time, it will be nice to meet some of the people behind it. There’s a news.ycombinator.com meetup at the same exact time, that I’ll unfortunately miss, but it’s my backup plan in case something goes wrong with the party I flew out here for.
Anyone else going?
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