"What we want to do in the venture capital business is take a lot of risk (which should be rewarded with a low entry valuation) and then actively mitigate the risk we took as much as we can (thereby reducing the risk for future investors and increasing the valuation).

It's the same thing that entrepreneurs want to do. When they leave their safe job and go out on their own, they are taking a lot of risk. Their entry valuation should be zero, meaning they (collectively if they have partners) own 100% of the business for whatever startup capital they invest.

By the time they offer equity to new investors, they should have reduced some of the risk. By developing a product, or by developing a technical and operating plan, by attracting other talented people to the team, or by getting customers and revenues (and sometimes even profits)."

--VC Fred Wilson, writing about risk and rosk mitigation on his blog

I have 932 people following me on friendfeed as of today. I love this service because it so easily included my annotated delicious comments, which I'm not-cross posting this blog.

If there are another 68 people who read this blog who'd like to follow my feed, it would be neat to get to 1,000.

If you're interested, this is the link.

Update: 8 hours later--I have added 9 people today..Anyone one to help make it an even 10?

"will be headed to Boulder Colorado this summer save 2 weeks when I'll be back in NC for the beach and my wedding... I'm thinking this will be a pretty sweet summer if Tara and I can get into the long distance groove again. 3 months isn't bad right? Right? Right. :-)"

--Foodzie co-founder and fellow TechStars participant Nik Bauman, writing on his tumblr blog.

Susan sez: Puts my own 3 months away from the Bay area and my sweetie, family and friends into perspective, dunnit?

Did I mention how much I enjoy Weezers Pork and Beans video?  The meta-approach of making a video that includes bits of popular vids from YouTube--notably Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain Blendtec's "Will it Blend" blender, Miss Teen South Carolina, the  Numa Numa video, All Your Base are Belong to Us, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, the "stupid" ninja guy, and a nerd who made  the Guinness Book of World Records for wearing the most t-shirts at any time.
just makes me smile.
Loving the wit of it every time I watch.

I've spent part of the morning--and will spend some more time--updating my lifestream data to reflect what I'm up to right now. So Louis Gray asked, what am I up to?  So, here's where my attention is going to be these days:

Co-founder, People's Software Company
People's Software Company is creating a new community platform that will make it as easy to start a community site as it is to start a blog today. Even better, our tools will make community sites lively and sustainable even for small groups. It's the magic of crowds -- for smaller crowds.

I'll be writing about our start-up experiences here and on the soon to be launched PSCO blog, will share more about our products, roadmap, business model and what problems we've solving/what's different as it moves from concepts to execution.

And of course, as a TechStars 2008 company, we're getting a great incubator experience.

Evangelist, Knight News Challenge, 2008-09
The Knight News Challenge just awarded over $5.5 million dollars to  16 software development projects from across the globe that support online discourse, community dialogue and engagement, and news as an empowering information tool.

I was a reviewer in 2007-08, and I will work with the strong team at Knight to run the 2008-09 awards. Applications will open in September, and we want to have a broad diversity of great projects...more on plans to spread the word and support prospective applicants in the next few months,

BlogHer CE
I've been writing for BlogHer since the early days, and value a chance to be part of this community. Sometime, it's a stretch, time-wise, but I want these connections to deepen and continue, so I keep fitting it in, somehow.

What's off the list?
Consulting, advising, general trouble-making will have to be on hold for the foreseeable future. 
Those 22 working hours in every day just aren't going to be enough, so this is going to be working smart, prioritizing, and GTD, all the way. And it will be tough, I know that--but I am excited about our plans and the value these projects can deliver to people.

"But if we dare be more than pretty eyeballs driving the market, we must challenge the deep misogyny pulsing at the heart of the hypertext transfer protocol."

--Melissa Gira, Valleywag, writing about women, sexism and net businesses with true Swiftian sarcasm in a delicious post.

I've been at TechStars for about 36 hours; the program started Tuesday night and it's Thursday morning now. My hopes when I accepted the spot we were fortunate enough to be offered was that this would be both an accelerator for building our company and launching our idea, and a good school to learn about being a CEO and co-leader of a small business.

After 36 hours, my sense is that it is going to be both of those things (more all all that in some other posts), but it is also going to be a major journey of transformation.  After 3 months of this program, I am going to be significantly altered in what I know and what I have experienced--and that seems amazingly exciting.

Two of the themes that have started to emerge at TechStars are: "Find amazing mentors" and "Early stage VCs fund people, not ideas."

TechStars director David Cohen (who is wonderful) is the proponent of the first statement and what it means to him (and therefore to all us eager students), is Find people you click with, who have knowledge you need, and listen deeply, learn from them, and build those relationships."  We have about 50 mentors who are part of the program, mostly local (or seriously passing through) and a big part of the focus is meeting with them.  But we're also encouraged to reach beyond these folks, into the local community and into the world, letting the TechStars team help make connections, if needed.)

Brad Feld, another founder (and a bold and interesting VC), is the person who talked about how early stage VCs fund people, not ideas. According to Brad, much of  the judgments about early investments are based on feelings about the founders, the team and whether the person can deliver. Because ideas morph, both to meet budgets and timelines, but also because of user feedback on your early releases, So while having a business plan, a sense of where revenue is going to come from, and some solid data are all important, the relationships are core(at least for Bard and his circle.)

For me, this implies that part of the TechStars experience is learning how to develop ideas and run companies; while getting the right focus for our big idea and truly defining what problem we are solving--and then iterating a product solution to address these solutiuons --is key, so is absorbing this wisdom so we can do it again and again--and that feels amazingly transformative.

"When a site designs an API, what they usually do is take their internal data model and expose every nook and cranny in it in great detail. Obviously, this fits their view of the world, or they wouldn't have built it that way, so they want to share this with everyone. In one way this is like the form-fitting lycra that weekend cyclists are so enamoured of, but working with such APIs is like being a bespoke tailor - you have to measure them carefully, and cut your code exactly right to fit in with their shapes, and the effort is the same for every site you have to deal with (you get more skilled at it over time, but it is a craft nonetheless).

Conversely, when a site adopts a standard format for expressing their data, or how to interact with it, you can put your code together once, try it out on some conformance tests, and be sure it will work across a wide range of different sites - it's like designing a t-shirt for threadless instead."

--The always wise Kevin Marks, Epeus' epigone, An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt

The nicely forward thinking Knight Foundation has teamed up with the Drupal community to create a rolling series of funding opportunities. Grant forms and info are live at http://groups.drupal.org/knight-drupal-initiative; this is a great way to drive forward community platform development in the Drupal environment, IMHO.

From the website--What the goals are:
Drupal and the Knight Foundation agree that open source digital publishing can enable powerful agents of transformation in their communities.

Knight Foundation is working with the Drupal community on the Knight Drupal Initiative with the following goals in mind:

• To enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry.
• To provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all.
• To encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas.

Knight Foundation believes that five basics define transformational projects:

• Discovery of the facts.
• The vision to see what's possible.
• The courage to push for change.
• The know-how to get it done.
• The tenacity that gets results.

I would love to see folks like Chris Pirillo and Chris Messina apply for grants!

Take a look at my new essay, The End of Innocence and Making It Big: The NYTimes spins yet another lost girl tale of innocence, regret and discreetly hot sex, at BlogHer.
A snippet:
"Is there truly any less foolproof way to sell the Sunday issue that to get huge viral buzz from a damsel in distress story played out in that most modern of locales, the blogsphere?

Call it cynical on my part, but I can just see current NYTMag editor Adam Moss looking back over the upper-middle class waif stories (and media sensations) of Joyce Maynard and later Elizabeth Wurtzel and wondering if Emily Gould's sob story of error and reform would generate the same page views and buzz those two highly manufactured heroines achieved.

While much of the media criticism and the consumer comments have focused on Gould's narcissism and opportunistic use of her beauty, sexuality and position, and the aggressive marketing of her subsequent prettily teared up regret, no one has talked much about the cold-blooded cynicism of the Times in assigning and publishing what is just the latest incarnation in an ongoing series of sensational stories by attractive young women who struggle."

So, it's Boulder.

The start up that my partner and I are working on got accepted as a TechStars 08 incubator company, so we're here for the summer, working away, building the product, learning as much as we can.  We're new, we have tons to do, and this is going to be our place to make it happen.

I'll be posting daily about what I'm learning, the product we're developing, and what it's like to build a product--and a company--in this environment.

For many people, Paul Graham is an essential touch point in building a new company. His perspectives have the ring of experience--and a lot of wisdom, so I'm compiling my own list of nuggets to absorb--here's a batch of good points from the most recent post (worth a whole read).

• Release early: "Users hate bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon."
• Release often: "Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to keep thinking of improvements."
• Value the users: "The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors."
• Be afraid: "You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing."
• Determination is everything. "The only way to convince everyone that you're ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to."
• Manage your optimism: "Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals. If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to happen."

And the money quote: "Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life."

So, the road trip is over.  The adventure is just beginning, but I'm in the place I am subletting for the next few months. Dog seems calm, even seemed to enjoy getting petted by 6 people at a festival we wandered through last night (even if one guy was kinda drunk).

Being done with this most recent trip and about to settle into the next thing. This means I am going to be really busy, but it also means my brain can finally downshift off Susan's Big Changes and into blogging more broadly again.

Welcome, that.

At Motel6 in Auburn, CA (good, free wireless). Food, then back in the car and 9 hours of the big highway, with breaks, of course. Getting a kick out of the WY and Idaho plates in the parking lot.

Brad Feld pointed to a super astute and articulate post from VC Dave Feinleib on why startups go bloey. Cheat sheet summary is (and the whole thing is worth a read):

• They spend too much on sales and marketing before they're ready.
  
• Spending on the sales and marketing operations means there is no return if customers don't bite. When you spend money on the product that work can be leveraged in future versions. (In fact, the key to effective product delivery is to try a lot of things and see what sticks.)
• The market outpaces the startup's ability to execute. In the case of the startup in a hot sector that means how fast do you make critical decisions, hire key personnel, and manage limited resources. If, on average, you're slower or less efficient than your competitors, you're very likely burning more cash than they are as well.
• There is no Entrepreneur.  But rare is the man or woman who can take an idea and transform it into a sharply defined product and then sell it to top-level prospective hires, investors and customers. An Entrepreneur as opposed to his lower-case counterpart is a product picker and a market visionary.
• The market takes too long to develop.

(Via Brad)

NYTimes columnist David Brooks keeps writing the coolest stuff. Here's some snippets from the latest, on the ascendency of geek culture:

"The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis."

and

"Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers."

"The Tech Industry is what happens when really smart people get paid to have so much fun that they lose touch with reality."

-- Sarah Dopp, blogger, tweeting away.

"The problem we would soon find out was that having hundreds of active users in Chicago didn't mean that you would have even two active users in Milwaukee, less than a hundred miles away, not to mention any in New York or San Francisco. The software and concept simply didn't scale beyond its physical borders."

--Meetro founder Paul Bragiel, writing about his crashed and burned start up and the lessons learned in a wise and useful post on TechCrunch

" Hours after Techmeme launched in 2005, search uberblogger Danny Sullivan remarked "there's no keyword search facility that I can see. I want that, and soon!" Nobody wants to let Danny down, so I got right to work and 32 months later, a search box now sits atop the site."

--Gabe Rivera, TM chief cook and bottle washer

Susan sez: Fun, and hoping RSS feeds for search results follow soon, yes? (Like that's a much simple problem to resolve and ship, right>? Can we have it, uh, tomorrow?)

"Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn't require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job. The fantasies of perfection of replaced by the fantasies of utter failure."

--John Perry, Structured Procrastination, a talk given at Stanford

Susan sez: I'm not much of a procrastinator these days, but I still relate to these feelings, It's a great essay, worth a read.

Authoritative newspaper article in the Boston Globe that says "...two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else."

Additional data points on this one are that "A certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths."
Furthermore, this article says "It may seem like a cliche - or rank sexism - to say women like to work with people, and men prefer to work with things."

Seems reasonable to me. After all,  if we stay with this argu=ment, then we also know that African Americans would prefer not to become CEOS or C-level executives; they stay out of those careers because they would simply prefer to do something else--NOT!!!!.

In other words, this is the most stupid, specious and circular arguement I have heard in a while, and I am embarassed a priestess of the journalism tribe would digest this booha whole and spit it back up for us,

Come on, woman, empirical reasoning does not rule!

Seems to me that when we make workplaces equal access and age/race/ and gender neutral, then we can ask these questions for real...otherwise, it's a question of  whether you're willing to be the exception--or not.

Woke up this morning and read Duncan Riley's right on the money post Blogging 2.0: It's All About the User, and Louis Gray's related and more personal Blogging 2.0 causing friction with 1.0 bloggers.

Duncan talks about attention shift, as I and others have, and then Louis picks up the meme and says: " You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they're the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they're the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise."

I found this amusing, because even as it has some truth, it also has that kill your foreforefathers meme that seems both way too old skool and quintessentially male. (As in the young bull elephant fighting the old one for the herd, and so on...)

Seems to be the new--and better way--to go forward--is to educate--and collaborate. That seems to be what has happened as careers blogger Penelope Trunk's launched Brazen Careerist as a new network--she' s teamed up with some 20-something folk, more recent grads, to build a site with far more reach and relevancy than either might have achieved solo.

When Louis says "Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it's hard to understand for those who've always accepted things for what they are," I agree with him. 

And yet, positioning a face off between 1.0 and 2.0 seems so yellow-journalism, drive page views, WWE to me (And I'd like to be hitting 3.0, anyway, myself.)
 
I like Penelope's approach of inclusion, and appreciate how her network is based on bringing in the founders of Employee Evolution, a site dedicated to recent grads and their transition from school to work.
 
Seems to be that folks in our own little social software digital village could benefit from a similar approach, rather than emulate those elephants.

What do you think, folks?

I remember, even a year ago, I felt that I had it sweet with information management. My bloglines reader was full and well-organized, I had techmeme, blogher, and the NYTimes, and I pretty much cold check into flickr and upcoming whenever I felt the need. Plus I got lots o news in my email, and that crazy little thing called Facebook has these new status updates.

Yep, life was sweet.

Flash forward to today. May 2008. First of all, my attention has gotten completely fragmented. At any given moment I allow myself the luxury, I flit between twitter, Facebook, friendfeed, gmail, youtube, techmeme. and whatever else strikes my fancy. In truth, I feel like a high class street cleaner, someone who has to go back and start over the mind she's done cleaning  a particular expanse of road--in other words, scanning my feeds takes way too long, and once I've done it, I wonder if there's something that was added when I was somewhere else that I missed--and therefore, do I need to go back and start over?

Arrgh.

In other words, I'm halfway toward being a total flitterati.

What's a flitterati? It's when you have continuous partial attention for everything and nothing, when a steady diet of comments and 140 word tweets have dieted down your brain to where deep reflection seems impossible.It's when it's too much work to write something long, and when following along on other people's lifestreams takes the place of actually reflecting on what's going on.

Navel-gazing of the third kind, in other words. Only through a digital lens. Extremely fun, but truly broken, and scary if reflection is what you value.

Queen of Spain, aka Erin Vest, interviewed Barak Obama this weekend, and did an amazing job. Erin's interview addressed policy questions developed by BlogHer members--congrats to all,this is very cool.

As Lisa Stone says on her blog, Surfette, Obama is the first presidential candidate to a directly address BlogHer's audience of nine million women each month via BlogHer.com and a publishing syndicate of 1,800 blogs.

"Park Slope is a perfect storm of stereotypes that provoke derision. Since Park Slope is the neighborhood most explicitly associated with urban parenting, it attracts the wrath of people who think parents have gone way overboard. I imagine there's some horror fantasy fusion: the well-off Park Sloper and co-op member who is obsessed with his kids. Oh, wait, I just described myself."

--Outside.in founder and writer Steve Johnson, Slope resident, quoted in a NY Times article on the neighborhood others in  NYC love to hate..

Susan sez: This the where I lived for much of my life in NYC; amused it is so trendy now.

"I can't think of a company that I am more impressed with than Google, but they are coming to grips with the fact that "startup energy" can't be faked. There's nothing quite like going from five people to fifty or a hundred."

--VC Fred Wilson, issuing an open recruitment call to Google employees who want "something more entreprenurial."

Susan sez: I like this because a) it's probably a true observation, b) it is so amusing to see someone use the start-up story on their blog as a way to woo staffers away (who want to go, natch), c) I feel a small bubble of jealousy for the now well-fund companies Fred is doing this for--we're way more early stage and I don't have substantial real money yet to woo away Googlers, so I am both admiring and a little envious.

(And having said that, if you are kick ass FE and want to work with a very cool start up this summer, I am the woman to contact..we are early stage enough you can have a BIG impact.)

"I can't think of a company that I am more impressed with than Google, but they are coming to grips with the fact that "startup energy" can't be faked. There's nothing quite like going from five people to fifty or a hundred."

_VC Fred Wilson, issuing an open recruitment call to Google employees who want "something more entreprenurial."

Susan sez: I like this because a) it's probably a true observation, b) it is so amusing to see someone use the start-up story on their blog as a way to woo staffers away (who want to go, natch), c) I feel a small bubble of jealousy for the now well-fund companies Fred is doing this for--we're way more early stage and I don't have substantial real money yet to woo away Googlers, so I am both admiring and a little envious.

(And having said that, if you are kick ass FE and want to work with a very cool start up this summer, I am the woman to contact..we are early stage enough you can have a BIG impact.)

Here's Alex Polvi's  sweet one from the Vidooop identity contest--(and maybe a reason to take a break from life in the Valley, see if you can spot what I mean):

Today and tomorrow are the days to finish my errands and pack up my apartment before the movers come and put me in storage. Deconstructing three years of life, even in a place I didn't plan to stay, is a bit sobering and sad. And of course, I am packing far more boxes that I thought I would have to ship ahead to my destination.

As I wrote in my blogher essay this week, moving on is part of a process of change and growth that's led me far since 2005--but this month brings the most extreme changes yet--a new, exciting company, a stealth venture, and a summer in a new town, the finding another place to live when I get back.

But I feel so distracted! Just one chore after another, until it is time to stop.

"It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet."

• The Neural Buddhists - New York Times: David Brooks is a genius; great piece on science and sprituality.

• BREAKING: CBS Acquiring CNET For $1.8 Billion; 44.6 Percent Premium | paidContent.org: Roll up! "Among the sites in the CNET family that will be part of CBS Interactive pending approval: CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic."

• Demand Satisfaction! » The Get Satisfaction API is here!: Great announcement--what a way to go! "We've fully embraced OAuth as our third party identification protocol of choice, to ensure seamless, user-friendly, and secure account integration."
  

  
  

 So you want to join a start up from BINC Research totally caught my attention--the checklist of what a programmer should consider before jumping into a new company is pretty much a checklist of what a founder would want to cover.  Some of the key BINC points:

• Do the founders have a track record? Successful exits?
• Does the team feel like you will fit and be able to go for it, together?
• Funding: How much is there, and what's the plan?
• Maturity: Do you want more equity, more impact, less cash--or the other way around?
• Culture: Who are these people and do you like their dogs? (Or their partners).

As we pull a team together for the as yet unnamed project I'm working on, these questions are really relevant--not only to people who might join us, but to the founders.

Seems to me, we need to build the kind of company we'd want to work for, and then be able to be articulate about what we're doing, who we are, what the path is, and what we have to offer.

Would I join my own company if someone else was recruiting me? The pressure is to create something that honestly makes me say Yes.

The Knight Foundation just announced the 16 winners of the 2008 News Challenge, which give out $5.5 million dollars to fund a set of projects that support tools for online media and citizen journalism, community discourse and empowerment, and grassroots mobile media.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, received one of the awards for a standards project run by the Media Standards Trust and the UK-based Web Science Research Initiative that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

These awards were meaningful to me for a few reasons:

• I was a judge for 2008
• Local community, citizen journalism, platform tools, and community-focused mobile are of vital interest to me
• The conversation between people building tools, aka developers, and people creating content, aka journalists,bloggers, consumers needs to accelerate so that people over 25 start to understand that content and form can't truly be seperated online (like, the medium actually IS the message.)

The press release says:

• the number of applicants for Knight News Challenge increased 82 percent in its second year, to 3,000
• the percentage of foreign applicants increased to 40 percent from 15 percent in 2007.
• the contest was advertised in 10 languages.
• there was a new "Young Creators'" category to reward the ideas of those who are 25 and younger--and six of this year's winners are "Young Creators"

The new cycle for funding applications opens in September and goes into the fall; I'm going to be helping Knight with the next cycle and will be posting some ideas about  making the application process work even better and building on what's come before.( There will be chances to get everyone's input who wants to contribute.)





- 

" I feel like Match.com is a zoo where you're walking around looking in cages and saying, "That is an interesting animal there." Like I said, we try to make OkCupid more like an online bar. So you're there, you're hanging out. You're taking quizzes, you're posting on someone's journal. You're just socializing, but there happen to be hot guys and hot girls. That just seems so much more natural than the zoo feeling. It's also much more empowering and irreverent than believing that there's a Dr. Phil or some guru of romance that you have to defer to. There's no greater power than the user in our opinion..."

--OkayCupid founder Sam Yagan, describing the value of his free online dating site in an interview with the Village Voice.

(Via Boinkology)

I'll be at the Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, in support of the Knight Foundation announcement of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners.

If you're not aware of this Knight program, it's a multi-year grant program that supports innovative ideas that use digital media and technology (mobile, platforms, etc.) to transform local and regional community news and support discourse in the commons. Knight has funded both very location specific projects and much more platform-driven efforts and these efforts have jump-started platform and tool development around local, community, news and even some social justice and accessibility issues,because of how well-distributed the funding has been.

Last year's News Challenge (2007) winners iwent to 25 individuals, and to private and public entitiesthat ranged from individual developers to  MIT to MTV. This year's list of winner's is equally cool, and the announcement of the winners is tomorrow.

In two weeks, I move out of the Silicon Valley area for a brief stint and head for the next great adventure. The work it's taken to get to this moment and the degree of focus getting a start-up into even a semblance of operating mode is considerable, and I feel like the longer, more reflected and crafted pieces I wanted to--and occasionally wrote and published--on this blog, have suffered.

Instead of commentary on social media, it's been tasks, chores, logistics, errands, recruitment, funding, operations, moving--all the time, pretty much (with some writing specs and planning).

Even my reading has narrowed down alot more into the startup stories--Hacker News is my new best friend.

So starting this week, I'll be doing more blogging about where leaving Yahoo has led me--to starting a new company--and about the start up experience in general.  My intent is to chronicle what happens to us over the next four-six months. I want to capture the experience of pulling a team together, creating a plan and a product, and share some of the stories of winding our way through the funding and focusing process, getting to alpha, and making real quality execution and value happen.  I've started alot of businesses, run my own consulting company, and been an exec building value at a number of big companies--but this is my first run at a true start-up--and the engines are reving now.

Meanwhile, I know many other people have knowledge and experience to share. So, iff you have great reading, great resources, or stories to share, please post in  the comments, or ping me directly...thoughts, comments, etc. welcomed.

"As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit. (I know more than my fair share of people that have, and I didn't see any of them posting armchair bs on the comments)."

--Upcoming co-founder Leonard Lin, writing about scaling twitter and the general brouhahaha.

Susan sez: Check out these links as well.

• joestump.net » Blog Archive » It's not the language stupid

• I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Ted Dziuba

• random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

• Liminal Existence: Scalability

• Scaling Twitter » SlideShare

1. 
   

Chuck , the SEO Rapper, Prophetic Prophet sez: "My 9 to 5 is in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Consulting at an agency called Pop Labs." These videos are where his passion lies--

Susan sez: No doubt there are many performances at web advertising sales meetings and awards dinners in Chuck's future.

According to the Daily Mail, a Facebook flashmob stunt went awry when hundreds of very pleased with themselves people had a tremendous entertaining waterfight in the middle of Leeds, a UK city. Only thing was, they apparently trashed a prize-winning garden during the rout. Oops!

So we're creating this start up, see. And my co-founder and I live in different places.

And while we're be together for a chunk of time very soon, we're not now. So we have these looonnnggg telephone conversations about everything: the product, the use cases, the solutions, the tech innovation, the coders, how we will make money, what we will build and in what sequence, why we'd do it that way, why we wouldn't do it that way, and on and on.

What is interesting to me is that three things are happening as we hammer away at all this--really, as we hammer away at everything.

A) We're norming one another to a common view of our business and our products; ie talking it out makes it clearer and we speak the same words/share the same vision.

B)  We're learning how to communicate on a deeper level--we've been friends for a while, but we've never done something this bit together--and we're still getting one another's styles.

C) We're figuring out what's the  right story, the right set of paradigms to describe what we are making, who is is for, and what problems we want to solve.

And C is just the most interesting place to linger, because it's where we align our vision with what we want to tell others, with the competitive landscape and with the paradigms and metaphors that will make our story come alive.

The story we're telling isn't unified yet, which mean it isn't com