"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.

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 completely right, but it's exciting as hell to get the process (along with about 90,000 other things) truly going.

"How do you know if you're in over your head in a healthy way as compared to an unhealthy one?  One entrepreneur gave me a good rule of thumb for this just yesterday.  He suggested that entrepreneurs follow an 80/20 rule - they should always feel in command of 80% of the business, but feel way over their head 20% of the time.  It's that 20% stretch that makes it fun and challenging. "

--Boston VC Jeff Bussgang, writing at Seeing Both Sides, about the stretch running a company can create--he's got some good coping suggestions as well.

So, now that I am starting a company(more specifics on that later, and with a great partner), I've got an amazing number of things to balance. There's the ideas, the plans, the people to work with, the timetables, the costs. And then, on the other side, there's the budget, the funding, the roadmap..all those things that take resources and dollars.

In my usual fashion, one of my ways to learn is to talk with people about their experiences starting companies (thanks, you know who you are), what they learned, what they wouldn't do again. And then there's my time honored exercise in reading as a means to knowledge. I've been rooting around, looking at entrepreneur's blogs, founder's blogs, VC's blogs, and all sorts of other resources.

And here's what I learned: There's a hellofva lot I am going to know six months from now, I don't know today. But if I don't find a way to manage the info flow, I am going to a) drown and b) interrupt all the stuff I really have to do to get our idea going.

How do you balance getting critical things done/momenteum with absorbing information? What's your style? Comments here, or elsewhere, welcomed.