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The second demo day was even better than the first. The Y C office in Mountain View is much larger than the one in Cambridge, but it may have been even more crowded. The investor atmosphere in the valley is much more energetic than the one in Boston (think rave vs. coffee shop) so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. A large percentage of Y Combinator alumni live in the bay area and turned out for support too, giving me a chance to meet a few of the ones I’ve spoken to mainly through email over the past three months.

We got into town Monday night. Tuesday was the Y Combinator dinner, at which Sam Altman was the guest speaker. It turns out he’s a poker fanatic. I’ll have to hook him up with a copy of my book. He told me the $20/$40 games at Bay 101, which is maybe 15 minutes from Mountain View, are pretty much off the hook, which matches what I’ve heard about that place in particular and California in general. There’s a good chance I’ll spend some of my spare time (should I ever find any) grinding away there in the near future. I haven’t played in so long that I actually sort of miss it. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy it, at least a little, now that it has been relegated to hobby status once again.

Wednesday we met with a couple investors who were interested in our company and looked at a few potential apartments for our pending move. That night we went back to Y C and practiced the demo a bit more with the projector. We’d moved all of our stuff back to Ohio and we hadn’t had much time at all to practice in the intervening week, so I needed to shake off the rust. Eventually the intern said he was leaving and that we could stay if we wanted to, but the thought of being alone with Dexter and Monty had me as scared as a basset hound at Michael Vick’s house, so I opted to head back to the hotel and get a good night’s rest.

There had been a few other groups there doing the same, and I was immediately impressed with how much they seemed to have improved over the past week. I was even more impressed the next day, when I got to see bits and pieces of almost every startup’s pitch, and they were all better. In fact, after seeing that and hearing investors talk about how great they were, I think Y Combinator should always do a Boston demo day first, even during the winter session, just to give people the practice.

A lot of the improvement was due to confidence. Everyone there had already presented to a room full of investors and had gotten good feedback, so there was a lot less tension. It showed in the demos. It is truly amazing how much difference confidence makes in every aspect of life, but nowhere is it more apparent than public speaking.

Our presentation went very well, though I think I talked a little too fast since we came in at about 6 minutes, whereas our previous demo and every practice session was about 6:45. I’m almost positive I didn’t forget anything, so I must have sped up. I don’t know why, despite the lack of tequila I was still less nervous than the previous one. But there were probably fewer errors, and it’s probably better to be a little shorter than everyone else anyway (things you are interested in seem to go faster than things you aren’t, so if something goes faster and you aren’t timing it, you feel like you were more enthralled) so all in all I think it might have been better.

Later I agreed to be in another group’s demo. They were doing a product involving webcams (I can’t tell you any more than that) and I was supposed to be one of three people in a back room talking live to Jessica. I was going to be second in the rotation, but when it came my turn I saw and heard nothing and after a few seconds the video skipped on to the third guy.

After the demo was over, I found out that everyone had seen me (good thing I wasn’t picking my nose or something) but since I didn’t know what was going on, I just sat there looking at the camera. The founder doing the demo told the audience I was boring and moved on. After they told me that I realized it wouldn’t do to have a crowd full of Silicon Valley luminaries thinking I was a dullard, so, at John’s suggestion, after the next group was done I went out in front of the audience and said “I’d like to make a quick announcement. I am not boring, I just wasn’t seeing any video. I’m not boring at all. Thank you.” That one got a lot of laughs, and I’ve gotten three emails since from investors who started off by mentioning that I am, in fact, quite lively.

We capped the night off at a bar called Nola in Palo Alto. You can see pictures of it here along with all of the other Y Combinator-related ones I took if you’re my Flickr friend (and if you aren’t, you should be). It was nice getting a chance to socialize with the other founders a bit. You spend so much of those 10 weeks building your product that you don’t really get any human interaction outside of your cofounders and the weekly dinners. In fact, if I had it all to do over again, that’s one thing I’d be sure to do a little more of.

We’re back in Ohio now. I’m going back out to the valley next week to meet with a bunch of different potential investors and find a place to live. We’ll probably aim to get out there sometime in mid September. It’s going to be a crazy year. The breakneck pace we’ve been working at will probably slow down a little, now that there’s no demo day looming, but it can’t slow much. The internet is just too competitive to rest.

I’ll probably be spending most of my time for the next couple months putting together a round. We’re thinking a medium to large sized angel round or a small V.C. round (preferably the former) would suit us best. John and Chad will keep hacking away, making the site kick a little more ass every day.

I will unfortunately be separated from my wife (and dog) until her school year ends, at which point, if all goes according to plan, we’ll sell the home and buy something in between the valley and Davis, where she’ll be working on her Ph.D. Being back here with my family has restored what little sanity I left with, so I’m going to be sure to spend a little more time at home throughout the year than I was able to this summer.

I think in most ways, the rest of the year will be a lot more pleasant than the summer was. We’ll have a bigger place (probably for about the same price) than we had in Cambridge, so we won’t be crammed together, which really irritated us all. The pace will still be feverish, but not as insanely so. And we’ll have beautiful weather, whereas Cambridge was either hot and muggy or hot, rainy and muggy all summer.

And I’ll be living in a place that isn’t entirely paved and littered with trash and homeless people. Cambridge is such a dirty city, at least in most areas, and I can’t stand that. Being an Ohioan I’m accustomed to grass and trees and lakes and animals that aren’t pigeons, so the concrete jungle really sets me on edge after awhile.

I do have to give Cambridge props on the restaurants though. The service is uniformly atrocious, to the point where I wonder if it’s some sort of conspiracy, but the food is varied and tasty. And it’s Boston, so the beer selection is pretty amazing. I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve never been anywhere where even the dingy little diners had five or more microbrews on tap. It’s enough to almost make you forget the pervasive sewer stench. Almost.

So I guess there are some things I’ll miss about Cambridge, but I won’t be upset if I never see it again. The people I met this summer, though, are a different story, and I hope to keep in contact with all of them. Luckily most will end up in the bay area sooner or later, and some even down in the valley with us, so maybe we’ll continue the weekly dinners. Maybe we can get Paul’s chicken chili recipe.

 

 

This entry was posted on August 25, 2007 at 2:17 am and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.