Staying in a warehouse

I’ve been meaning to write about the place I was staying in when I first arrived back in San Francisco for a while, but for various reasons almost all related to forgetfulness, have left it until now.

As Pat’s house was full the brim with people, Amir and I were looking for somewhere else to stay for a couple of weeks mid-May, and found this place on AirBnB. The back story is that a group of friends from Wisconsin all decided a shared living space would be fun, and arranged it so that they were all free to move at a pretty similar time.

They found an ex-car repair shop somehow, and moved in pretty much immediately. It was a bare shell when they bought it – just a large space with a small office, oil-stained floors and an extractor fan. That was a year ago, and they now have about 4,600 sq ft of livable space, which is housing something like 13 people. It has 10 bedrooms, a home theatre, a couch suspended on chains and a tiki bar. As part of their build out they basically built a whole second floor complete with emergency netting in between walkways to catch drunks (and people sleep on it sometimes, also).

We had some great times in the warehouse, and it’s been great popping back there since to enjoy cocktail hour. I started Bay to Breakers there this year, with the world’s spiciest 7am Bloody Mary, and last week, they had a Russian-themed party to celebrate with two Muscovite newlyweds that were staying in the warehouse.

The atmosphere you get when there’s a bunch of interesting people all living together was great, and has definitely motivated me to find / create something similar when I’m not so busy…

Escape to LA

The plan for last weekend was for me to visit my friends Alex and Sam in San José on Saturday, then all of us would come up to San Francisco for the How Weird street party on Sunday.

However, the Devil vomitted in our metaphorical kettle when Sam decided to go and see her mum for Mother’s Day, and it turned out that Alex’s uncle was receiving a graduate degree that Sunday morning in LA.

Seeing as there’s a crazy street party pretty much every weekend for the whole summer in San Francisco, Alex and I decided to take little road trip down to southern California!

Me and my eyepatch

I got the CalTrain down to San José to meet Alex on Saturday afternoon, and we set off pretty much immediately. As time was of the essence, we took the most direct route – the I-5 straight down through hundreds of miles of farm-land. There was one stretch of road without any sort of bend, rise or dip for about 80 miles.

Luckily, we had Taco Bell to break up the trip, my new second-most favourite fast food chain (after the incomparable In’n'Out). Bean burrito, chicken taco, cheesy beef burrito, chicken taco, cinnamon twists and a bucket of coke for $6: BOOM, that’s a recession buster.

After six hours, we dropped into LA out of the Hollywood hills at about 9pm and went to see a friend of Alex’s, Johnny. He was having a little soirée, so we played some silly games and had a few drinks with a bunch of LAers, none of whom were aspiring actors, to my surprise and disappointment.

Johnny's house

On Sunday morning, we drove across LA to Loyola Marymount University, where Alex’s uncle was receiving his graduate Theology degree. Luckily it was cloudy in the morning; Loyola Marymount appears to have the world’s largest class of educators – it must have taken them half an hour to file across the stage – and my blood’s too thick for the full-on SoCal heat.

After the ceremony, we went down to the beach for a meal in a nearby restaurant (salmon and eggs Benedict: nom), and a potter on the beach.

This is a beach

With only a few hours left in LA, Alex and I headed up to Bel Air and Hollywood to mince around the palm tree-lined streets and gawp at the never-ending parade of rat dogs, pneumatic blondes, cars worth more than my house and codpieced action figures posing for photo opportunities.

Me and Britney

Hollywood is the place most disconnected from reality I’ve ever been to.

Bye bye South by

The Film and Interactive elements of South by Southwest wrapped up on Wednesday, meaning it was time for me to head back to the UK.

The first couple of days of my visit were a little dreary and grey, but this all cleared by the time I left, meaning that as I headed to Austin airport, the city was bathed in sunshine and live music poured out of every bar. The Music element was just getting started and it was very tempting to extend my stay a few days longer…

The panels I enjoyed the most were probably Lessig’s (as mentioned before), and Gary Vaynerchuk’s which I just caught the end of. I had only tangentially heard of Gary before, and the topic of his talk was no doubt less epic than Larry’s, but the enthusiasm he brought was just amazing. Someone in the audience likened him to an eight year-old on speed; combine that with wicked humour and Belorussian DNA and you’re about there.

The word on the street is that the most valuable part of SxSW is not the organised panels, but the informal, serendipitous meetings which happen in all the after-parties, lunch breaks and hallways. Now I’m not sure about that; being lucky enough to live in San Francisco, I get those sort of chance encounters all the time – the range of amazing people you run into is one of my favourite things about the Bay!

Instead, it was the little glimpses of Texan life off the well-beaten SxSW track which I valued the most.

For example, on our last night, George and I headed out for a steak dinner (which is traditional in Texas), Brazilian-style (which is not). The idea is that you get a little marker with a red side and a green side. As long as the marker is green side up, obsequious chaps in jodphurs rush around with steaming spits of deliciousness, smothering your plate in fillet mignon, sirloin, chops, cutlets, sausages, … It was incredible.

Another highlight was going to a Texas two-step night. We only knew about it because Christoff’s friend, Pearl, put us onto it (then patiently pushed us round the dance floor while we stepped on her). Two-step’s a style of dancing with three steps in it, and although it’s hideously simple, I completely failed to master even the basic pattern. It’s galling to be shown up at a physical activity by overweight octogenarians, but this happened repeatedly – there was even a grandpa there with a special move – suddenly jumping a couple of feet into the air, clicking his heels, then continuing to sashay around the dancefloor as if nothing had happened.

Overall, I found that the everyday Austinites were much more down-to-earth and honest than the hipster San Francisco crowd, and unbelievably liberal given the state’s voting record. Still can’t wait to get back to the west coast though

Highlights of last day or two at SxSW

Yesterday, I went to hear Larry Lessig talk on campaign finance reform and how it’s relevant to everyone, no matter what your political afflilitation or pet peeve. The message was that the sub-standard handling of climate change, the financial crisis, Iraq, and any other issue, is a symptom of a government implicitly beholden to the lobbyists who finance re-election campaigns.

There seems to be a zeitgeist emerging from the Obama campaign of the people reclaiming the government for themselves. His election promises of more transparency and accountability definitely resonated with a lot of people; hopefully the much bigger challenge of campaign reform will be able to ride the wave.

Later that evening there was an interesting moment at the Digg party. It turned out that a queue of 150-200 people were all waiting to get an autograph from (Digg-founder) Kevin Rose. Meanwhile, Lessig walked in and no-one batted an eyelid. Kevin’s a smart guy and everything, and Digg is a great creation with legions of fanatical users, but there’s something wrong when a guy who has worked selflessly for copyright and campaign reform for more than a decade gets less respect than the poster-boy of the current fad.

On the bright side, I just saw an absolute flash of genius here. A company called Jungle Disk, instead of printing and distributing shiny flyers like everyone else, simply put their URL on a small piece of plain printer paper. They then stapled the paper to a $1 bill and threw handfuls of them off a balcony onto people emerging from the Nate Silver keynote.

Companies are giving away stacks of flyers here – the table I’m at now is entirely covered to a depth of 2 or 3 thick, matte card adverts. The problem is that people just take them and throw them away immediately without even looking what they are – there are special recycling bins just for this purpose. So to see a crowd of people actually rushing to grab flyers, rather than dispose of them, shows they really hit something there…

This post earned me cake

Currently at the South by South-West conference in Austin. I saw a fantastic talk from Larry Lessig this morning advocating campaign finance reform as the first step to fix America’s broken democracy.

The event’s been brilliant so far; lots of interesting talks on interesting topics by interesting people. The only real frustration has been the labyrinthine Austin Convention Center venue. The architect seems to have deliberately hampered any attempt to get from the 4th to 3rd floor – there’s a variety of lifts, escalators, even staircases, which go to one floor and not the other. Very confusing.

On the plus side, when trying to get to the 4th floor just now I ended up in the 3rd floor bloggers lounge, where they’re giving away free cake. So this post is justification for the delicious sponge cake I just took and demolished.

Visa saga part 3: tax records special!

My trip to the US Embassy was quite an experience.

The debacle really started while organising a time to go to the embassy and get the O-1 visa processed. Visa petitioners have to make a pre-arranged appointment (so far, so gravy), these appointments can only occur at 8am (inconvenient, but acceptable), and the appointment “hot-line” costs £1.20 per minute. One pound twenty per minute!? I was living on that much per day in Nicaragua.

On top of that, the ludicrously expensive phone call culminates in you authorising them to take a further $131 as a Machine Readable Visa fee, whatever that is. What are they doing which costs $131? Doesn’t machine-readable just mean a barcode? Specially formatted text, like we have on passports? An RFID tag at a push?

Onto the actual appointment itself. One of the warnings included in the appointment confirmation is that you are required to wait outside “even in inclement weather”, so I was quite pleased to find it a clement, if nippy, morning in Grosvenor Square.

Other warnings include the restrictions on electronics in the embassy: no mobile phones, laptops; even USB sticks are verboten. After enjoying my traditional English queue, the security drone’s eyes lit up when I produced a few coins and a pair of headphones from my pocket before going through the metal detector.

“You can’t take those into the embassy, sir”, he japed. “Ha ha, good show”, I chortled heartily. Unfortunately, the steely, lifeless eyes framed in his frozen, mirthless visage made it all too clear that he was actually serious. The headphones posed a threat to national security.

“Those could be used as a transmitting device”, he asserted with a mind-bending mix of inaccuracy and self-assurance. Not wishing to get down to the brass tacks of just how egregiously incorrect he was, I conceded defeat, and paid £5 (five sterling) to store the headphones in a plastic bag for an hour.

Security checkpoint cleared, I was in the building. After a modest wait, I was called for an interview with a chap from Texas. He seemed perfectly happy with all the O-1 visa stuff; perfectly happy until it came to tax records. As I’d spent a few months in the US last year, paid for in part by my company, it now appears that full tax records for me and the company are required reading for some lucky State Department employee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we really have any tax records… We haven’t paid anyone any money, and I haven’t been paid any money, so there are no IRS filings. We have an ID for the company and an ID for me, with no documents associated with either. Still! I suppose in a way this is what they’re looking for: proof that I haven’t been paid. It just seems a little fallacious to prove something by producing a lack of evidence.

So this means that I’ll need to come back to the UK again, after my trip to Austin. On the bright side, it should be super-simple from here on – the hard part is over. All I need to do is mail in all the required documents (or lack of them), in a nice big envelope to really emphasise the volume of tax records which don’t exist, wait for them to check that the envelope really is empty, stamp the old passport and I’ll be heading back to Cali.

Quite a week

Even for one with as rock and roll a lifestyle as I, this last week as been pretty eventful. And surprisingly, all good events.

We’ve taken massive steps in partnering with two huge companies, got good coverage in TechCrunch, various venture capital firms are getting very chummy, we’ve sorted out my attendance of the South-by-South-West conference, as well as Microsoft’s MIX event in Las Vegas, pushed out a major new release of the product and, last but not least, I got a visa.

It’s at times like these that I appeal to my rationality and remind myself that we’ve been working, and working hard, towards all these things for a while. There’s no such thing as karma; at least I hope not, or next week’s going to be crap!

US visas: why so easy?

As I expected all along, my O-1 visa came through today, so I am now free to live and work in the United States for the next three years.

To be honest, I’m a little surprised at how easy it is to come by a work visa nowadays: although my case was a no-brainer, perhaps they should think about raising the bar. Perhaps 2 Nobel prizes rather than just 1 would keep out the riffraff?

Either way it is great news and it’s a massive relief for it to be sorted; even not getting the visa would have been better than interminable limbo.

I’m sending waves of good energy and positive karma to my co-founder Amir and lawyer Chris for all their help.

US visas: why so difficult?

More doom and gloom from our visa lawyer, I’m afraid.

A few of the recent O-1 applications he’s made have been denied, unfortunately, despite them having strong cases to make; cases as strong as ours will be…

It’s probably to do with the economic downturn – the pressure to defend American jobs is definitely growing as unemployment increases. The technology sector should be relatively solid, but with news like Microsoft cutting 5000 US jobs, I can see the Citizenship and Immigration Services raising the bar a little bit, whether implicitly or explicitly, deliberately or subconsciously.

I suppose they want to give those laid off MS workers a chance to “get first pick” of all the other jobs out there, and ensure that us job-snatching interlopers don’t stage a bloodless coup of the labour market.

Unfortunately, that makes absolutely no sense at all. For people like me and my co-founders, people whose stated purpose is to start a business, create jobs and grow the economy, being denied access robs a country of the potential upside (albeit small in each individual case) and greatly increases our chances of failure. Oh and if we fail, we’ll unfortunately be taking a bunch of US investment capital to the grave with us, further destabilising the situation.

The idea that not letting us do a startup in the US will somehow give American entrepreneurs an advantage is patently bollocks. In fact, lively, varied, cosmopolitan environments – the sort of environment you encourage and nuture by… well, for starters letting people into the country – give rise to fantastic ideas. Fantastic ideas that US industry would benefit from, not suffer.

Not only that, but barring me from your country is not going to make it any harder for me to put my product in front of your residents. I’m not going to be leaving a hole that your own home-grown entrepreneurs will be able to fill. It’s just going to make my life extremely awkward.

It smacks of intellectual protectionism, and is retarded for all the same reasons as economic protectionism, plus a few more.

What’s the thought process here?

So, these people with good degrees, solid work history, ambition and no criminal record want to come to my country to give jobs to my peers? If they succeed, everyone gets rich. If they fail, a small number of wealthy people lose money they knew might be lost?

Not a chance! Go and blight some other country with your presence and tax revenue!

WINchester

I spent last week in Winchester, staying with my friends Rich and Su, after a brief spell in Cambridge with Amir and Kirsty.

I have now recognised my various homestays as a veiled excuse for quality testing group-play video games. It all started in Nicaragua with Lee’s rum-fuelled Guitar Hero III, followed by real-ale and kebab-fuelled WiiTennis against Amir (I absolutely dominated him, BTW, no matter what he says), a cheeky bit of Samba di Amigo with Kirsty (at which she obliterated me), and finally a good few hours of Tangfastic fuelled Guitar Hero World Tour at Rich’s.

Now staying with parents in Bury where group play video games means shouting the answers at VCRed episodes of University Challenge.

I stopped in at my house in Southampton, which is being well looked-after by my tenant, to pick up mail and found I’m now eligible for my freebie Cambridge MA. That means it’s been 10 terms since I graduated – I’ve been out of university longer than I was in it! Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be around to attend the dinner and pick it up… whether that matters I don’t know, but I am definitely going to refer to myself as Mr. James Brady BA MA (Cantab) MBCS at all times from now on. Makes referring to oneself in the third person much more fun.