Boston and Beyond

So finally I have some time and feel like writing something on this blog. I feel very good and everything is going well, which is pretty cool.

Its been 2 weeks since we have been in Boston, the first week seemed to take a long time to go through but this week was a lot faster, presumably because I am getting into some rhythm.

I did a lot of shopping in the first few days. Combine, cheap products, great currency exchange, the feeling of being on holiday and having a salary after 7 months, meant that shopping was actually quite fun. Also Heathrow lost my bags for 4 days so I had to buy some clothes. I even got trainers (sneakers here :) ) for $17 with my other $80 trainers, nice ones.

A lot of people eat out everyday, kinda gets a bit sickening. I have got myself a cheap bike (from Target), which is really useful but gives me less of an excuse to not go to the supermarket.

I slept on Pete’s bed for the first week, I would have slept on the sofa bed but he loved the sofa bed. But now I am living in an amazing place with another Y Combinator team, Crystal Ballers (picture dedicated to them). These guys are from Microsoft, and are pretty cool. Right now I am sitting in their lounge and they are talking in a very involved way about guids, I think they have said the made-up word guid at least 20 times in the last 2 minutes.

Enema, does everyone in the UK know what this means? Savraj (a Crystal Baller) wouldn’t tell me what it meant so I was forced to ask him loudly in a supermarket many many times, hehe.

We have some pretty cool offices and have made really good progress on our prototype in this week. The first week was slow with loads of distractions, no server, general lack of rhythm and it seemed to take forever. Now I am waking up at 7:30, going for a run, getting in the office for 9:15 working staying till on average 8:30pm, getting home, having dinner with the either Pete*2 or Crystal Ballers. With regular entrepreneurial meet-up and some random events distributed throughout. Its actually a massively immersive experience, everyone is talking about their ideas, we are always talking about our ideas, very few distractions.

A lot can be said about immersive experiences, it is possible to reach a reasonable immersion in London but this is far more extreme. I think immersion does speed up the learning experience a lot. I think its possible to have immersive experiences in things apart from entrepreneurialism, such as art, sport etc. Although I haven’t really cared about anything else as much for as long a period.

Having said that, I have actually stopped reading tech news as much as I was before. I think I reached the point where I realised I was spending a lot of time on it and not learning that much. Tim Ferris in his book recommends that you limit reading news to less than 4 hours a month and instead just ask knowledgeable people for news, that seems like a sensible plan, although I am still going to read 15 mins or so every day.

Is it weird that I like people that are similar to me? Actually I don’t mean “I like them” I mean respect. I think its because I try to aspire to qualities that I respect and develop them in myself so I have assimilated these qualities to some extent over time. Therefore if I see them in others I like them and they are generally similar to me.

Paul Graham is pretty cool, he seems to have a celebrity status with a lot of people and I have never really felt the whole celebrity thing for anyone, but here is a rough quote from Paul Graham that I liked:

"If you have something that will excite some people and piss off others, do it, because most startups go through their life and never excite anyone"