Back in the US

Wow, no update for a month! I’m going to blame that on England being completely technologically backwards – one day, I spent about 2 hours walking round looking for free wifi. On a Friday afternoon. In London. In the end, I had to pay £10 for 2 hours access!

In England, they say that you can walk from Cambridge from London never leaving land owned by the University (which is bollocks, by the way). In San Francisco, I’m pretty sure I could walk from the house to the Bay never once leaving free wifi coverage.

England was fun, I got to catch up with a lot of family and friends, although I’m definitely due a trip further north than Cambridge next time. The traveling was a lot less hectic this time, as I only did Southampton, Bournemouth, Winchester, London and Cambridge, and had a bit more time to do it. Highlights included the Sandbanks trip in July, food tasting with Su and Rich, writing braggadocious visa recommendation letters from various high-powered people and the Hollyoaks omnibus.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. I was pretty hopeful about getting bumped onto a later flight (with all the voucher and upgrade goodness that brings), but ended up just getting upgraded to the extra legroom section, which is actually quite a big deal for a man as impractically shaped as me. Slight drama with immigration in Washington, as I got pulled to one side and asked why I was spending 9 months out of a year in the US, without a visa. Was I perhaps working? The nice man let me in when I said we were going to be bigger than Google, but he made it pretty clear I’ll need a visa or a wife before I’m allowed back in.

Last night, we threw a surprise birthday party for Pat’s girlfriend Emilie, which I crashed slightly late, and there’s a house-sitting party tonight too, so I feel like I’m straight back into the swing of things.

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.

Startup School

We’re slowly dragging ourselves back to meaningful work again, as we follow up with the leads we have to close a funding round in the next few weeks.

There have been a couple of fun things over the last week. On Saturday there was Startup School, organised by Y Combinator – a series of talks from various leading lights in the entrepreneur world. The standout sessions for me were a rabid but well meaning rabble-rouser from DHH (creator of Rails), where he made wild assertions about the Right and Wrong choices for people to make when starting companies, followed by a neat (and I think unplanned) subsequent rebuttal from Paul Buchheit (creator of GMail), who suggested that:

Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice

I actually enjoyed DHH, and agreed with a lot of what he said. Paul Graham was good too.

The only other note-worthy event was randomly meeting June Sarpong in a bar. She was small and less annoying than she seems on T4. The end.

I’ve settled down into a routine of worky worky and sleepy sleepy now, although I seem to be on 28 hour days at the moment – pushing back bedtime until I find myself eating lunch at 2am. Really looking forward to mid-March when we can think about sitting back for a bit!

Also, Justin’s flirting with the Everyman Sleep Schedule which I may adopt if he seems to be holding together.

We’ve been out and about for a couple of trips this week!

On Thursday or Friday I went for a bike ride round San Francisco with Pat. He used to be a hardcore Ironman triathlon type, but hasn’t ridden in a while so it wasn’t too painful for me. SF still is a hilly place however… it didn’t help that the initial rush of excitement of leaving the house led us to immediately tackle an offensively steep street. I was a gnat’s whisker away from blowing chunks at the top, and breathing tasted a bit like blood for a while.

I’ve got a map with our route below – we basically headed north to the bay, then across to the Golden Gate and back through a slightly seedy area where we saw the fuzz arresting a prostitute.

Plans have been laid to go across the Golden Gate next time, up into the conserved National Recreation Area.

This afternoon, I went for a run with Amir up to the top of Bernal Heights, which has amazing views across all of the bay. We took along Pat’s dog, who I tried to race to the top of the hill. The bitch won.

I’ve always taken fetishistic enjoyment from making pointless maps and graphs, so here’s a lo-tech list of the places in SF I’ve come to know and love so far:

Pat’s house — it’s the blue and white one. On the corner is the Jay’n'Bee, where we watched the superbowl.

Can’t be bother street-viewing the rest of them.

Hard work

We’re fully set up for working at Pat’s place now, having been sat at the kitchen table or on the sofa up until now. Mark and Pat cleared out a load of stuff in the garage and after a re-arrange and installation of some heaters it’s a nice and quiet place to get stuff done, although it can still get a bit nippy sometimes.

Work’s going really well – over the last two weeks we’ve gone from pretty much a cold start to teetering on the edge of having something we can show to other people. It’s still ropey and I’ll be really embarased for anyone to see it, but They say that if you aren’t mortified by your own product then you’ve launched too late…

If we get something out there (for limited testing) by Tuesday, out of all the teams on the secret program, we will have started last and finished first. I’m very good at that.

To treat ourselves for all this hard work, we left the house for a reason other than food – the first time since we arrived. We drove down to the Marina District, by the bay on the north side of the San Francisco. It’s the area where they filmed that car chase from Bullitt, and Pat’s car was straining a bit going up the slopes carrying 5 burly computer ninjas.

We went down to the bay with a nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge – I was disappointed to find out only really lives up to a third of its name – and chucked a frisbee about. Obviously, I got the frisbee stuck in a tree, but combined pine cone-throwing efforts saved the day.

New food:

• Jamba Juice fruit smoothies – awesome
• Odwalla Superfood Micronutrient Fruit Juice Drink – looks like pond scum but tastes like the sun rising over a golden meadow on a crisp summer’s morning
• Eggs in the hole – ‘the hole’ is a bored piece of bread, into which you drop an egg
• American bacon – basically, the offcuts of English bacon, burnt to a crisp

Up and running

Nearly a week in and things are going really well. We’ve spent the last few days brainstorming, prototyping and eating lots.

Pat’s helped us tick quite a few culinary boxes so far – I’m going to try and keep track of my new tongue-tingling taste adventures here. This week, I have been mostly eating:

• Burritos (al Pastor and carnitas style) – soft, thin wrap filled with diced meat, rice, guacamole, salsa, refried beans. Delicious, and not causing me any problems so far.
• Tamales (pork and beef) – steamed corn dough parcels filled with shredded meat and thick gravy. Not as good as burritos.
• Nachos like you’ve never seen before – actual deep-fried tortilla with spicy guacamole, sour cream, salsa, mince, cheese, …
• Mac and cheese – macaroni and cheese, but made from a packet. We’re on a budget.
• In-N-Out Burger – much, much better than the name suggests. The best takeaway burger I’ve ever had, and the “4×4 animal style” is four patties, eight slices of cheese plus extra fried onions.

I’m not sure what this diet is doing to me – I went to the gym with Pat yesterday and felt so rough I had to have a sit down after trying to bench the imperial equivalent of a litter of piglets.

On the work front, Justin and Mark (co-founders of another startup) are joining us in Pat’s house, staying in the flat downstairs, which is great as we’ll spur each other on and they’re good guys as well. Of the five of us, four are English and all of us went to Cambridge.

We just got back from Mountain View (the secret program we’re on is based here), where we had the first of our weekly Tuesday night dinners with all the other founders, investors and external guests. It was good fun and we’re all the more focussed and determined after hearing all the advice from previous years’ alums

The recommendation from all sides is to work as hard as you can manage for as long as you can take, so our provisional plans for a skiing trip up to Lake Tahoe this weekend have gone out the window. Power naps and regular tea breaks are this man’s secret weapons.

I’ve arrived!

An eventful couple of days…

I started the New Year with a house full of stuff, rooms which needed cleaning and bags that needed packing. By 1:30am on the 2nd, I had an empty, clean house and bags full of clothes and tea. At 3:30am I got up to go to Heathrow, where I met Amir and his wife, Kirsty, as planned.

Queuing to check-in, we were told that the flight had been overbooked, and would we consider being bumped in return for $1000 flight vouchers. We had nothing planned to do in SF, so we took the deal, ending up on a flight 20 minutes later, with a free upgrade to business class. Breakfast was champagne and lunch was filet mignon.

The stopover in Chicago was pretty uneventful, but the red carpet lounge was nice, with a subsidised bar…

Pat came to pick us up at San Francisco International to make the 10 minute drive to his place in the Mission district. The house is great – really nice old style to it, and full of gorgeous aged oak furniture which Pat seems to find in dumpsters.

After having some tea and a bite to eat, and saying hello to Emilie (his girlfriend) and Henley (his dog, named after the regatta), we headed out to walk round the block and have a couple of drinks in Jay’n'Bee, the local bar.