500Startups Experience – Week 1

What a week.  This was more intense than my first week in college.  Well, just kidding but this first week at 500Startups was full of events and fun memories that I’m sure many of the F11′ers will bring up to each other even many months down the road from now.

This first week was all over the map – as it should have been.  In the last 7 days, I got some free lunches, met the fellow founders and their companies (all 32 of them) only to make fun of them later, spent a night at the office, found the only hookah place nearby, and had some fun dancing like I was back in college (my rugby buddies know this well).  My week went something like this:

Monday: Our day started off pretty shitty-ly.  ”Orientation” was scheduled for noon for the official kick-off so the team and I wanted to get in the office around 10am.  But, this being our first weekday commute down to South Bay Area from SF, we naïvely naturally chose to drive down 101.  Almost 2 hours and a lot of cursing after, we arrived at 500.  Luckily, we weren’t late for the orientation because what ensued in the office living room was what I expected out of 500: a lot of swearing and threats from Dave McClure.

With all kidding aside though, Dave, Christine and Paul really pumped us up.  They really drove home what it means to be #500Strong.  It means a lot to be one of the youngest (just a little over a year, to be exact), yet one of the most connected family of mentors, advisors, and founders of companies in all types of stages not only here in SV, but all over the globe.

Monday’s Memorable Quote: “Normal startups die. Do not be the norm” – Dave McClure. [tweet]

Tuesday: Took 101 again, gambling that Monday was just an abnormality.  Wrong.  Need to find a new route.

Luckily again, we didn’t miss the first lunch session.  Eating my free lunch in the living room with everyone else, I listened to Adam and Mike at Spinnakr show how the founders can utilize their product for our fundraising.  Spinnakr is a really cool product and allows you to intelligently display different contents on your website based on where the visitor is coming from.  Imagine being able to show a certain homepage for a visitor coming from an article on TechCrunch and a completely different homepage for a visitor coming from our AngelList profile.  This is some really great tool and I’ll definitely be using it for Redeemr.

After the lunch session, we went back to work like everyone else until rather late and decided to join our desk neighbors, Rob and Geoff at MelonCard for a late dinner.  It was unique to hear their experience and the journeys they took to come up with the idea for MelonCard which automatically opts you out of any online information databases (like Spokeo) that store your private information and sell them.  After dinner, we went over to their apartment nearby the office and got to know each other better through this game called “Half-Baked” (rumor says Dave created the game) where people go around in a circle pitching “half-baked” ideas based on the two words shouted out by the two people right of you.  It was my first time playing and I got rocked, hard.

Anyways, it was great to check out their place because I was interested in finding a place closer to the office so we could spend more of our days working and not driving through traffic.

Tuesday’s Takeaway: If you don’t want to spend 3 hours a day going to MV and coming back up to SF, stop taking 101.

Wednesday: 40 minutes.  I guess that’s all it takes to get to MV from SF if you take 280.  Thanks to this, my day started off phenomenally.  In the morning, one of Redeemr’s advisors visited us at 500 and we gave him a quick tour of the office and talked about our action plans and strategy for our product distribution.  In the afternoon, Paul held his information session on AngelList in the living room and shared with founders the 500Startup tips and tricks (like the startup version of the secret recipe) on how to get funded on AngelList.  After editing and reviewing our page, we published our AngelList profile and immediately the weight the 500Startups name has on getting attention from other investors.  I didn’t realize 500 and Dave are two of the 5 most followed accounts on AL.

Even with this new AL thing, the team and I were actually able to get a lot of work done in preparation for our upcoming launch.  I learned how productive I could be personally in a shared office setting like 500, if I didn’t let all the different events and distractions take my focus away from actual work.

However, throughout the day, there was a lot of chatter and excitement about the upcoming event on Thursday titled “Night of Special Pitches”.

Thursday:  We got into the office around 10am and was later provided with a free lunch, again (Tuesdays and Thursdays have already become my favorite days of the week).  Fast forward all the non-important stuff (because, who wants to read about what I did during work?), Thursday night was a night to never forget.  On our shared 500Startups Google Calendar, there was a Q&A session with the alumni of batch #000 and #001 that started at 4:30pm and from 6-9pm, the event was called “The Night of Special Pitches”.  This has become a 500 tradition, where every first Thursday of the new accelerator batch, everyone just gets wasted from beer and try to pitch other team’s companies just from their name while inebriate.  As much as I think it would be amazing to share with everyone the pitches of every team, I think it’s just something you’ll have to earn to experience once you become part of the 500Family.  Anyways, you mix alcohol with startupers, apparently you get a lot of sex or drug related businesses because just about every single pitch was solving the needs of everybody’s sex or drug related frustrations and problems.

Afterwards, we all danced like maniacs and sung our hearts out to Pitbull, LMFAO, and Lady Gaga as DJ Pauly S (aka Paul Singh) worked the turntable that is his Macbook.  I had an amazing time dancing like I was back in college and every one of us really bonded with each other that night.  Many of us decided to continue our night and went bar hopping then to the club on Castro St (500 is in a great location).

I didn’t want to go back home when Mike and Murry were headed back up to SF, and I ended up making cozy on one of the many couches in the living room of the office for the night.

Thursday’s Memorable Quote: “Gizmo, sex toys in the cloud.” - Paul Singh. [tweet]

Friday: Waking up in the morning, I promised myself I will never sleep in the office again.  My back hurt like crazy and I got absolutely no sleep because the first group of people came into the office around 8am (I had gone to sleep around 5:30).

Even though I was tired, I ended up getting a lot of energy drinks and powering through the day.  Friday was a very laid back day as everyone started making their way back to the office around noon or so.  Later in the day, Robert Scoble and the RackSpace crew came by the office to offer every startup in the batch a year’s worth of free hosting.  Having been RackSpace customers already, we signed up in a heartbeat along with many others in the program.  They even brought free t-shirts and beers with them.  The former was warmly welcomed by everyone, but the latter wasn’t so as well accepted for a good reason.

Saturday and Sunday: Weekends are really low key at 500.  There aren’t any events going on and many choose to work out of their apartments and homes with their team instead of the office.  But my team and I prefer to work out of 500 on any given day, so we enjoyed being able to get A LOT of work in with minimal distractions.  The thing that sucked was that the building management shuts down the air conditioner during the weekend, so for the next few weeks until this weather starts acting more like the way it should, I’m going to be wearing as little clothing as possible.

13 weeks until Demo Day.