Cash and Kites

We’ve been up to quite a bit recently. Work and non-work.

Work

The biggest news is that we’ve now got cash in the bank from some investors in England. We’ve got a list of people who wanted us to get back in touch when a round of funding was coming together, so we’ll hopefully be able to close down some more investment over the next week or two.

We were also featured on the Firefox “Recommended Addons” list, which is a pretty big deal for us as it pretty much solves distribution up to a few million users, so long as you’ve got a great product and you can scale the backend…

The product obviously needs more work, but as always, we’ve got lots of good ideas! The backend is a more measurable thing; we know for a fact we can’t scale properly yet as interest spike totally knocked over our servers. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and really enjoying it.

Non-work

There’s also been lots of fun stuff happening. We’ve been kite-surfing a couple of times now. The first time was a bit grim, as it was pretty cold and I spent about half an hour untangling lines. The second time was awesome, however. I started with a small ~9m² kite, just flying it on the beach. The things pull so strongly, it’s amazing. Even with that small kite, you have to clip it into a harness, and it was easily pulling me along the beach and up into the air.

It went pretty well though, so after a while we put the wet suits on and I tried it for real, with Pat’s behemoth 19m² kite. I did manage to get upright, being pulled along, but I had very little say in which direction I’d be going in next.

After that, we went to Pat’s friend’s office. This office is awesome for a number of reasons:

• it’s on an abandoned air base
• MythBusters is filmed next door
• it’s in the disused air traffic control building
• it’s got 6” naval guns outside it (they don’t work)
• they bought a fire engine, which is now in the back yard
• they’ve converted the ATC tower into a bar, with 4 glass walls

I’m really looking forward to a party I’m planning later this month. The next version of Firefox (the browser we’re targetting) is being released mid-June-ish, so we’re having a launch party… with a difference. The first screen you see after installing the browser is this. So, we’re going to get a bunch of people together to re-create the scene in a park in San Francisco. Artist’s impression on the party wiki. I actually can’t wait.

I am now going to go and eat some watermelon with balsamic vinegar. If you’ve not tried it, you’ve never lived.

Sun, tennis, kite-surfing, frisbee, vomit and funding.

Apologies for the delay in posting an update – every time I came to WordPress is seemed to be down.

Summer is really here in San Fran now – it’s absolutely blazing hot, getting up to 35°C today and tomorrow in and around the Bay. I got a slight rouge on yesterday, despite being sat in the shade all day. That’s right, even the shadows are bright enough to burn you. I’ve been looking into investing in a paddling pool for the back garden, but Americans just don’t get it: for them, a small pool is 16 feet across!

We have relaxed our working a bit I suppose; we go to play tennis every other day or so, and Pat’s going to teach me to kite-surf just as soon as the wind gets up again.

I’ve also been looking round for some peeps to play Frisbee with, and have been repeatedly disappointed. In a way, I really like the laissez faire, laid back approach Ultimate players take – it tends to encourage fun games. However, when you’ve spent the morning piecing together a bike from parts, fixing punctures, brakes and derailleurs and finally pedalling on this Frankencycle to the opposite side of San Francisco, over the cliffs that pass for city streets round here, only to find that the players decided to stay in bed / commune with nature / go to WalMart instead, it gets a bit annoying. I will persist, though, as I do love a cheeky bit of disc action.

Unfortunately, the weekend before last was a compete and utter write-off: we did have quite a few drinky winky woos two doors down at Jay’n'Bees on Friday night, but when you lose ~5% of your body mass on Saturday in the form of vomit, I’m thinking the slightly questionable chicken breasts I “cooked” for dinner might be the culprit.

We’re getting there with securing more funding; I don’t want to jinx it now but we should be closing deals in the next few days. We’ve gone for a smaller round than we might have done, because the time you need to put in to chase VCs is just ridiculous, especially for a company at our stage. We really like the guys we’ve got lined up though, personally and professionally.

I’m now going to have some Lady Grey and pound cake. Bye bye.

Please Sir, can I have some more (funding)

Last week was presentations week, which all went off without a hitch I’m glad to say. Pat and Amir put most of the pitch together and did the talking, while I’ve been filing a couple of patents before we start bandying our ideas all around Silicon Valley.

The scariest moment of presentation week probably happened when I was driving us to the second demo day. I was in such deep focus, solving the world’s technerdery problems, that I turned the wrong way down a freeway ramp, into the oncoming traffic, which was fortunately not particularly oncoming at the time. Justin screamed like a big girl.

We’ve moved onto raising more funding now, which is going well so far – lots of meeting lined up with the Right People. The debate of taking less money from an Angel or taking more money from a Venture Capitalist remains open – there’s definite benefits of both approaches – but we’ll see which seems right when the time comes.

On the food front, we had our best steal so far from the Y Combinator catering surplus: after the second demo day we made off with five massive trays of deliciousness – salami, cheese, sandwiches, fruit, chicken, brownies and more. Henley the dog ate most of the chicken and now has a room-clearing wind problem.

I’m looking forward to coming back home! I’ve not decided exactly when I’m going to be where, but in general terms I’ll be on the south coast for 2 or 3 days at the start of April, then will be going across to Haverfordwest (golf capital of Pembrokeshire, so I hear) and Derbyshire to see the nieces. Then London and Cambridge for more meetings with investors and potentially some disco disco disco dancing. Then California for the summer!

PS: I know some of you will love this flashy mix tape tool: http://mixwit.com/. They’re fellow Y Combinatororors, and I love their stuff. Also, if anyone wants to get in on the ground floor of a very promising startup, let me know – a company we’re friends with are hiring.

The beginning of the end of the beginning

We’ve got a big two weeks ahead of us, with lots of presentations to various silicon valley investors, culminating in the second “demo day” on the 18th of March.
Our flights are booked to come home – we’ll be in England for the first half of April, then back out here for a while from the 17th I think. It would be great to see everyone when I’m back home but I can probably only really afford to spend a week travelling round so I’ll probably have to limit it more than I’d like…

We made a couple of pretty surreal trips to the Google headquarters last week. The first time was to settle a spectacularly mundane debate about the swimming pools they have there. So, we rocked up at the Googleplex, as us cool kids call it, and sort of minced in, asking where the pool was. We did meet the security guard, but the fact he was on a Segway, wearing lycra and an ill-fitting helmet, really did him no favours on the “figure of authority” front.

My Mac’s hard disk curled up and died this morning, which was pretty annoying. Luckily I’d obviously been following developmental best practices to the letter, and had almost everything backed up on a remote server. Everything apart from my music, which is annoying, but will probably help my productivity.

Pat and I popped down to the Mac store in downtown San Fran, and they were nice enough to replace the disk with a bigger one, and upgrade the OS too, which was great! I think their wheels were probably greased by Pat dropping a few grand on a new MacBook while I waited…