When I become distracted, it takes a really long time to get back up to speed. If I lose the mental model of the system I'm building, I need to regenerate the model before I can continue to build. This is why long stints of uninterrupted time are most productive for a software developer: A very complex system can be designed and mapped to code. Interruptions to this process add significant overhead, and can easily double or triple development time.

Over the last few months though, I've noticed in myself another distraction that is more costly than interruption. If I am in a situation where I know it is possible that I will be interrupted, I'm limited in how much concentration I can bring to a task. This anxiety comes in many forms, but is almost always external. It can be as simple as sitting next to a friend or co-worker who you think might say something to you. It can also be something like knowing that you have an appointment coming up within the hour, and that you won't be able to get very far with your task before having to abandon the mental model and focus on something else. 

When building a software system, the effect is that I cannot get very deep into the mental model, which limits the scope, complexity, and quality of the system I am working on.

There are many ways to deal with this anxiety. In a work environment, the best is probably the headphone rule: If someone is wearing headphones, you don't bother them, unless something is really important. We're talking imminent physical danger important, like a fire (or worse, if the website goes down). To be effective, this shouldn't be implied, it should be explicit. In order for me to really concentrate, I have to know that people around me aren't simply deterred because of the headphones: they should know that this is a concrete rule.

In startups, for people who do both business and technical activities, try Paul Graham's maker time vs. manager time. Picking a time when you know it is unlikely you'll get a phone call or visit, and can devote yourself completely to some productive task, leaves you free from the anxiety of distraction.

I think this is also a great argument for having co-founders who are specialized, and another argument against being a single founder. Having one person be a full-time developer, and trusting another co-founder to take care of every other task, can be an incredibly powerful combination.

In corporations, if your developers are on a four-hour work, lunch break, four-hour work schedule, make sure those four-hour blocks are uninterrupted. If I come in to the office at 9am, and have a 10:30 meeting scheduled, and then lunch is typically around noon, it will be 1pm before I actually can confidently dive into a complex project. If the decision is made to leave sacred certain times for developers, make that decision a policy that everyone knows, and encourage developers to fight back if someone encroaches on that time. 

The ability to quickly design and code very complex systems with a high degree of quality is why really good developers are worth 50x or 100x as much as average developers, and the biggest software companies have budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range to recruit them. Don't let the threat of someone tapping your developer on the shoulder cripple them.

Last week, TechStars invited ten companies to come to New York for a new program called TechStars Wildcard. The feedback for these ten companies was that the selection team really liked the founders, but didn't like the idea they were working on. The program was very informal: a meeting at the TechStars NYC office for all the founders to meet each other, then a week to re-apply. The expectation was that ideas would change, and new teams would possibly form. (For some numbers, we were told over 1000 companies applied, about 25 were selected as finalists, and the ten of us were selected as Wildcards.)

Heyo was one of the companies invited. The decision to even attend was tough. I've been working on Heyo from San Francisco for the last few weeks, and it would cost a significant amount to fly to NY for a week last-minute. I considered it for a couple days and talked with a couple of my mentors and our current investors. It was a big risk: in addition to the cost, it would be a huge distraction, and by definition, accepting it meant we would be willing to start fresh with a new idea. It also sounded really exciting, and was unprecedented as far as I know of in the seed-stage incubator world. I bought a one-way SF-NY redeye the night before (I wasn't sure how long I'd be there), packed my suitcase, and flew to New York.

We met at the TS office a block off Union Square in Manhattan. About 30 of us founders sat in a circle, and were joined by a handful of mentors from the TechStars team. After a brief explanation from David Tisch of how the Wildcard program would work, we went around the circle and introduced ourselves. 

It was an amazingly talented group of people. Having founded Heyo straight out of college, I felt I was definitely one of the less impressive people there based on professional accolades. There were folks with backgrounds in private equity, VC, real estate, politics, hedge funds, high-frequency trading and obviously technology. Importantly, and to TechStars credit, pretty much everyone was also either a designer or a developer.

After going around the circle, the structured part of the Wildcard program was over, and we all mingled at the TechStars office for a few hours getting to know each other and talking about new ideas. Interestingly, it seemed that probably more than half of the companies there were building something similar to Heyo: a consumer product that required massive adoption to be successful, but was still in development or didn't have significant traction yet. (A sophisticated tech investor will tell you that companies like this are hard to fund, because there are thousands of companies trying to build the next consumer mobile/web tool to get mass adoption, and if you're only picking one, it's unlikely that you'll be able to pick the right one.)

After a couple hours, they kicked us out of TechStars, and a group of us went out to dinner. The discussions that night, and over the next couple of days were incredible. Imagine this: a dozen people sitting around a table. Nobody has a full-time job: everyone has either founded a company, or is living off savings while working on one. The stakes are incredibly high: a successful applicant gets investment from TechStars, and access to some of the best-known mentors and investors in the tech world. And everybody is willing to take a huge risk on a huge new idea.

Over those couple of days, we talked about a huge number of new ideas, from new approaches to health care and education, to multi-use retail space, to hover-boards. We even discussed the prospect of starting a new company with a dozen founders. The common thread of the conversation was, "What would this industry look like if we built it from the ground up? Would it look significantly different than it does today?"

After a couple of days of meeting with everyone, we started splitting into smaller groups, and working on more specific ideas. I won't go into details on what I worked on just yet, but I ended up teaming up with a couple other guys and spending the next couple of days working on a new idea in real estate. We ran around New York for a few days meeting with everyone who we could get time with, spent a couple days cold-calling potential customers, and by the weekend, had significantly fleshed out what this new company could look like. We re-applied a few minutes before the deadline, then headed out of the city.

The last few days, we've been building a simple minimum viable product to put in front of potential customers. We received word last night that we would not be accepted to the TechStars program. Despite that, we are continuing to work on this concept and may be forming a new company soon.

Thank you to Dave Tisch, Adam Rothenberg, and the other mentors at TechStars for inviting us and advising us over those few days. Thanks also to Jesse and WeWork for letting us work out of your sweet office for a few days. Thanks to Judd, Benjie, Dave, David, Roger, David, Sam, Matt, Nicolas, and Will for making the week awesome.

If you have experience working, building things, or investing in companies in the real estate rental market, please email me, fred at heyo dot com. Also, we're still looking for another technical co-founder, so if you're interested in getting in on the ground floor of something awesome, please get in touch. We think we might be starting in Chicago.

Yesterday, I flew to SF on a one-way ticket. I’m sleeping on a friend’s couch right now (plug: check out HeardAbout!).

At Heyo, we have been evaluating for some time the possibility of moving out of Blacksburg, VA, to a place that is more of a startup hub. In the last few months, we’ve spent time in New York, Austin, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We have decided on California, and a couple days ago, the time and ticket fare were right ($120, non-stop IAD to SFO, thanks HipMunk), so I bought a ticket and flew out. I packed a carry-on with clothes and coffee supplies, and my backpack with my laptop and business stuff.

There are many reasons we decided to move, both personal and professional. Here they are:

Professional

Blacksburg does not have a lack of talent. Hundreds of very talented computer science and computer engineering students graduate from Virginia Tech each year, and there is a solid base of technical professionals there. The handful of major tech companies in Blacksburg that have made recruitment a priority have been quite successful in keeping students and other professionals in the area. However, there are a lack of talented engineers who are familiar with and subscribe to the startup culture. That is, they are generally not interested in (let alone possess the requisite passion for) forgoing a career to live cheap, work hard, and start a company.

The same thing that draws me to the SF Bay Area draws many others like me. We are searching for others like us, with the aptitude and ambition to build awesome companies. Over the last several decades, this has created an eco-system of innovation, investment, and mentorship unmatched in any other geographic area in the world. I understand that there is a massive talent war in the valley right now, and I don’t expect it will be easy to recruit others to join us. However, I know from experience that other developers respond very well to our company and our culture. We solve a very real problem, our market is huge, and we are building a culture that places developers at the center of our business (because, well, we’re developers). I hope this will enable us to find awesome people.

We will also begin seeking investment in the next few months. Our criteria for investors is that they have done what we want to do, which is build an awesome web business. In Blacksburg there are a handful of these people, and many of them are our investors already. Out here there are thousands(?), many who have done it many times over. I want those people invested in our business, mentoring us, and thinking about our product.

Personal

I lived in King George County, VA (pop. 25,000) for 18 years, and Blacksburg (pop. 60,000, half students) for almost 8. When I was looking for what to do after my undergraduate degree, I found excellent faculty members in Blacksburg to work with for a masters degree. When I finished my masters degree and went looking for co-founders and investors to start a company, I again found them in Blacksburg. While I have travelled extensively in the U.S., I have never lived in large city. I’m young, single, and have no financial or social obligation to be anywhere. It’s time for me to leave Blacksburg.

None of this is a knock on Blacksburg, which in the last year has seen the formation of a startup incubator, angel group, two co-working spaces for tech companies, and Virginia Tech E-Club being ranked a top entrepreneur club in the country. I’ll be back often, and a part of me will always be there.

[Are we in a bubble?]

“Maybe,” says Naval, “Certainly valuations are creepy up quickly in all stages of deals. On the other hand, 10 years ago when we all felt like this last time the total market size for any company was at maximum 100 million potential users. Now we’re in the billions of users. Facebook connections alone bring 500 million, Twitter 200 million. 10 years ago we only connected for brief periods of time when we were at our PCs. Now we’re connected to apps all the time, everywhere we go. So maybe there’s a bubble. It’s hard to say. But we’re also looking at unprecedented opportunity.”

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/03/22/the-magic-midnight-mind-meld/

I've explained to many, many people why now is an excellent time to start an internet business, but the anecdote from Mark Suster below about the drop in cost is an awesome articulation of the point. Costs fell by an order of magnitude from 1999 to 2005. They have fallen by AT LEAST another order of magnitude from 2005 to today. From Mark:

When I started my first company in 1999 we spent more than $2 million on technology infrastructure including Sun servers & Solaris operating system, Oracle databases, EMC storage, load balancers, app servers, back-up devices, disk mirrors and on and on.  That is excluding a single line of code or paying any salaries.  No wonder people had to raise $5 million just to get started back then.  We raised $16.5 million in our A round.  Hardware ate just over 10% of the round.

We put all of this infrastructure in an Exodus web hosting facility and had to pay for rack space, bandwidth and some management services if a disk failed, for example.

When I started my second company in 2005 we decided to do everything differently.  By then the open-source movement had really developed.  We were able to use an open source database (Postgres), open source search (Lucene) and a host of other free components including Apache Tomcat, JBoss.  We still bought our own physical infrastructure: horizontally scalable application servers, load balancers, etc.  So I still had to outlay $50-80k for hardware costs.  So we only had to raise $500,000 to get going and again hardware ate just over 10% of the round.

And further down:

Imagine that you can develop software on your local computer but the entire service is delivered virtually through a partner in the same way people consumer energy with all of the scale benefits that go with that.  They deal with energy management, security, physical device failures, etc.

This has allowed people to get started for $50,000 and spend just $5,000 on hardware – again around 10%.

Full: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/12/09/data-is-the-next-major-layer-of-the-cloud-a-major-victory-for-startups/

"Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working."