Monday: We had our weekly batch meeting today and didn’t really talk about anything much other than some general house maintenance stuff and a few upcoming events. I did notice a lot more startups in the office today than last week, though. It seems like there were a few international startups who weren’t able to get in to the States until now. It’s always great to have more diversity in the startup scene and I love that 500Startups truly believes in that as well. Christine Tsai spent most of the day in the office and I hope this means that she’s back from her maternity leave, because Melissa (the EA) is going to schedule the Pho Challenge at the nearby Pho Garden for the first day she’s back from leave. Dick Talens at Fitocracy and I are going to attempt the Pho Challenge at the same time when that happens. For those that don’t know, Pho Challenge is 2lbs of meat and 2lbs of noodles.
In regards to the type of activities that happened today, the office was buzzing with people’s phones going off and talking on the phone with investors. Everyone seemed very focused on work when they weren’t on a call because many of us are getting ready to launch (including us). When everyone around you is #ELaMF’ing (“Executing Like a Motherfucker”) [tweet], you can’t help but #ELaMF yourself from all that energy around you and in turn, add fuel to the fire. It was great to have the team perform well today and Mike (aka Mags) absolutely killed it in sales today.
One Closing Thought: We spend roughly 2 hours a day driving going to the office and coming back home. At 7 days a week in a 14 week program, that’s roughly 200 hours per person spent driving on the road not being able to do any productive work – 800 hours total for the team. That’s like 10x more than what GroupMe spent to create the first version of their product… I’m trying everything I can to try and get out of our 12 month rent that was signed back in May so that we can move down to MV and spend more of our time working and less money on gas.
Tuesday: To/day/ was pretty much a regular Tuesday at 500. We got free lunch and the Forrst guys gave us exclusives to get on their brand new job board (LINK) so we could hire designers and developers from their super awesome community before anyone else.
Anyways, to/night/ was definitely not a regular night by any measure. I wanted to grab dinner around 8pm and Rob from MelonCard told me he would only agree to go out to Pho Garden if I attempted the Pho Challenge. My arrogant ass took the challenge and when we got there, Rob even agreed to do the challenge with me.
We started off strong and within the first 20 minutes, both Rob and I ate through about 70% of the challenge. The next 10 minutes, we slowed down considerably as the noodle started to soak up all the juice and was only able to finish another 10% (total 80% in 30 minutes). Rob took a break from eating at this point as he felt sick and I decided to power through the remaining noodles by putting noodles into my mouth and shooting it down with a shot of water. The noodles were starting to trigger my gag reflexes a bit by this point, but I thought I figured out a way to beat it, until… I got a horrible feeling as I literally felt the noodles overflowing from my stomach. Shortly after, I started the hashtag #noodlevomit and announced my defeat.
Pho Challenge
Side note: Rob never ended up resuming after the break he took at the 30 minute mark and held his noodles in, until he #noodlevomit his entire meal when he came back to his house that night.
I will never forget this day.
Wednesday: I felt like shit in the morning. I literally got kicked in the ass by bunch of carbohydrates. To add on top of it, I had a lunch meeting scheduled with someone from SVB at Pho Garden today at noon. First thing I did when I woke up was to change the place of the meeting.
Back at the office, everyone and their grandmas had a great time making Pho and #noodlevomit references back at the office. It was actually quite humorous getting made fun of about my experience, but I just felt sick to my stomach any time someone mentioned Pho…
Thursday: Today was an amazing day for us at Redeemr. We closed our biggest deal when our now-clients came to visit us at 500Startups to put the finishing touches on the deal.
We will make an announcement about this soon.
Also, later in the office and after a few drinks out, DJ Pauly S was spotted spinning the turntables (read: MacBook) again [picture].
Friday: Today was Day 2 of Design Bootcamp lead by 500’s Enrique Allen. Enrique brought in a bunch of super experienced UI/UX designers to talk about usability as well as lead some hands on exercises for us to really map out our product.
Unfortunately for my team and I, the timing couldn’t have been worse as we are really heads down gearing up for launch (We thought we’d launch last week L ) and ended up making the decision to forgo some parts of the bootcamp so that we won’t push back our launch date (again).
Pauly S, drunk again later Friday night, told everyone with pride that he will buy the “drunk.vc” domain name and start a blog there. Shortly after, I became the owner of the St. Vincent based domain (.vc) called Drunk. Early bird gets the worm, Paul.
I am now the owner of drunk.vc as well as drunkvc.com. All interested parties, please inquire via email.
