So with the departure of Caterina and Stewart from Yahoo, I don't think much of anyone from the gang of pirates, as Caterina dubbed the ADD team back in 2005/6, is left.

This is a large turn-over of the social media experts, not that anyone in the main product teams ever tapped any of their knowledge much, anyway, and it says a lot about how the Y! culture is heavily focused on things other than product innovation (getting people to land on their "start pages" and the ad platform for the newspaper partners and small business people would be where I'd guess all the efforts are going right now--in other words, a replay of the equally successful Knight Ridder and AOL schemes of 2003-06.)

When I joined Yahoo! in  2006, it was to the highly meat and potatoes Personals, but I was so excited at the chance to work in parallel, and learn from, the brilliant people who'd developed flickr, upcoming,  delicious and so on.

I did learn, but not because I recall Yahoo! packaging up their expertise across the org in any way, more because I sought them out--and very little of what I learned actually made it into our product, truth be told--we had to push so hard to rebuild a 2004 platform and tired interface to make our numbers that the virtual gifting, identity badging and other possibly game-changing stuff we hoped to release never happened.

And now Stewart and Caterina are gone, too.

 There are tons of other bright, talented people I know who are still at Yahoo! but those two had a special light I hope the company is sad to miss.

So I spent three days on the road to Northern Michigan, in a house with no wireless, reuniting with the BF and friends and..hiking...and sleeping. The whole time, my Blackberry kept me posted on the world: email, NYTimes, twitter, friendfeed, techmeme, and so on. The fact I could, even while I was on the road and in transition, do what I think of as continuous partial attention monitoring--ie looking at data more than I was contributing--is why I consider my mobile device as attached to my person forever (of course, as I write this, I then realize I left it in the car. Dooh!)

On the other hand, I've missed blogging...terribly. For me, blogging is part of a process of thinking, communicating, articulating, observing...just stopping would be a real shocker, so it feel so good to get back to the machine, coffee beside me, and start writing again.

For the next week or so, I am going to be in juggling mode--balancing working remotely on two projects--with taking a long-planned, long-awaited vacation by a lake with family and friends.  If I had no wireless, no mobile devices, no laptop--I couldn't have made this trip, even if we'd been planning this for a year (as we have.). Even now, I feel like its the strength and support of the teams I am working with that got me here. And I am grateful. For the colleagues and friends I have--and for those mobile, portable devices.

So, let's see. Woke up at 4:45 today, birds singing, dog snoring, temptation to head out into the cool Boulder dawn on  the walk path. Then I remembered all the things I was supposed to do tonight, and turned over and went back to bed.

6:30 awake. Reading email, drinking coffee. 7 am, finishing specs. 8-9 walk dog and hang out outside. 9-11, conference calls (very productive ones).  11:30, head down to TechStars, aka The Bunker.

1 PM Meeting with Mile Culver, Amazon Web Services preso. 4 PM call with prospective tech lead. 5PM Lost on UC campus, heading for Shelfari talk with Josh Hug.  Late. Call from prospective tech lead; uh, maybe not, not sure yet.

Okay. Back to the Bunker, 6:15 PM. Work some more.
9:30, head for home.
9:40, cleaning the kitchen and moving the owner's schmutz into a closet (yea!), smacking the moths in the cereal in the closet.

10 pm, Diana Krall, wine, blogging before the last cool walk in the night with the dog
.
Need to remember that if the moths are in the kitchen, I can smack them. If they are in my head, need to coax them out.

"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?

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."

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)

"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

"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.)

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.