Shanti’s Dispatches

Okay, this post might be a bit boring / narcissistic for some people’s tastes - but if you haven’t been to one of these shindigs here it is layed out from one dude’s perspective.

Tickets were $10 which I got from a Googler friend (shoutout to anxman) and drinks were free (woot woot).

Getting There

August Capital is about 30 minutes away from the city without traffic. The drive was quite pleasant — nice scenery, etc.

Google Maps told me to make a U-Turn at Saga Ln but you actually just make a left there and go up the hill to August Capital, Benchmark, etc.

The Line to Go #1

Taking a leak proved quite cumbersome. While I was entering the party, a guy who looked like Ross Mayfield (probably wasn’t him) in a hawaiian shirt was stepping outside, mentioning how he needed to find a bush.

While standing in the whiz line I bumped into Josh Knowles, a Phoenix-area Ruby on Rails developer who I had met previously at Refresh Phoenix.

Phoenix Connection

Next I met up with several other Phoenix entrepreneurs/developers:

Kimbro Staken and Sean Tierney, who were there demo’ing JumpBox and Joshua Strebel of Obu Web.

While we were taking a picture with the four of us, Julia Allison, heretofore unknown by any of us, decided she’d also like to be in it with us.

Of course we happily obliged. Sean says those pics will be up on Grid7.com at some point.

Snip: edited to protect the innocent.

The “Million-dollar Members Only” Episode

A bit later in the evening I was standing by the margarita station and saw someone who seemed a bit out of place for the party. Sporting a cool black jacket & british accent, he looked like he could be a member of a punk rock band, not a startup entrepreneur.

Upon introducing myself, another buddy of his showed up, who had two nametags on. I didn’t recognize their startup / company, but one of the nametags rang a bell — Alex Tew, creator of the Million Dollar Homepage.

Now, I’m sure this is kind of an awkward situation for this guy. For 99.9% of the planet, making a million dollars from, let’s face it, a pretty simple webpage, would be seen as an incredible accomplishment.

But for the TechCrunch party scene, it’s not quite as monumental.

I personally still think it’s really fuckin cool - the ~20 year old doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life, if he doesn’t want to. And being an entrepreneur with a million bucks in the bank must certainly be a different experience than when you’re starting a company right out of school and living off of ramen noodles.

He was also the first out of the gates with, in hindsight, an ingenious idea that was executed brilliantly.

I called over Joshua Strebel who I know would get a kick out of meeting Alex. A few minutes later Joshua led a 10-minute long conversation on Member’s Only Jackets, because, apparently, Alex was wearing a jacket that looked very “Members Only”.

I asked Mr. Tew what he thought about all of the knockoffs of his idea, e.g. 1000 tags etc.

Tew responded (paraphrasing):

They’re all shite. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done once mate, y’know?

So true, mate, so true.

Michael Arrington’s Followers

I’ve heard the Arrington line can get as bad as 20-strong. It wasn’t that bad last night — at most I saw maybe 5-10 startup entrepreneurs playing man-groupie to the ever-powerful TechCrunch Founder & Blogger, Michael Arrington.

Hey — I don’t blame em. Web 2.0 lore is rife with stories of startups being featured on TechCrunch and subsequently getting inundated with calls from Venture Capitalists. (Scribd, for one, launched that way to phenomenal success.)

Photo credit: “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” - laughingsquid.com.

Apparently a very attractive asian lady was in Arrington’s tow throughout part of the night as well. (not sure if that’s her pictured above or not…)

Other People I Bumped Into

Trip Adler - co-founder of Scribd

Babak Nivi — co-writer of Venture Hacks, a must-read blog for any startup entrepreneur

I’ll definitely be attending next time if I can get my hands on some tickets. The free-flowing drinks and bumping into some old pals definitely made the trip down to southbay worth it.

Just in case you were considering moving here to the lovely town of Phoenix, Arizona, let me tell you about the weather a bit.

Obviously we all know it can be scorching as heck out here during the summer months.

But it also never, and I mean never, rains in Phoenix for about 9-10 months out of the year. Literally, until last night, it had not rained in probably 6-8 months. And when it did (way back in the day), it might have been for only 5 minutes.

And then, last night and today … it just doesn’t stop. For almost 24 hour straight, on and off, it finally came down like a madman.

Anyway, enough boring weather talk. I’ve got some Ruby on Rails coding to do!

In less than 30 hours, I’ll be moving on from my current employer.

It’s been a fun little ride, but other opportunities have presented themselves and it’s really just the perfect timing for me.

I’d like to give a big shoutout to my pals here at the office — Thomas, Ed, Jim, Ron, Scott, Eric and the whole gang. Sorry I won’t be continuing with ya’ll, but Ruby on Rails, web app development, and early-stage startups are where my heart lies at the moment.

Starting Small, Finishing ….. ? with Sprout

I have the domain name StartSmallFinishBig.com, which I haven’t decided quite what to do with yet. Maybe a small biz blog, or local small biz networking group, who knows.

The thing I dislike about the term small business, though, is that it can:

1) Imply that what you’re doing is small. When clearly small teams can do big things.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

2) Imply that you’ll always be small. This is obviously not the case, but the picture I have of a “small business” is one in which the owner is struggling very hard to get things off the ground.

That first 1-2 years can be incredibly difficult and many (or most - I think like 80%) do not make it.

I hazard to guess that two years of struggle, stress and just barely making ends meet … is not the reason small business entrepreneurs went into business for themselves.

The Ideal Small Business

My ideal small business would be 100% automated, or backed up by a dedicated team of on-call support reps. So that, you know, I could take 2-month long vacations in Fiji and the Virgin Islands. Then stop off in Vail for a nice little snowboarding session.

E-mail and Internet access would be used to login and see the latest stats — how many new clients had signed up or how many new sales were made. (Oh, another $2,236 today, w00t!)

So, small is just a state of mind. It’s a stepping stone. That’s all.

The Big Act - Sproutit’s Weblog

You can follow along with our journey over on The Big Act - Sproutit’s weblog on small business, technology, our software and doing what you love.

Finally upgraded WordPress on here to 2.0.1 and got this site moved over to a new server.

Things were getting a little slow around here and it was a pain to blog. That’s all =)

More time wasting fun! I’m in the process of cataloging every book I’ve ever read (that’s worth mentioning) in the past 10 years (even beyond if they’re still in my library, i.e. Catcher in the Rye). I’m even trying to include the dates that items were “consumed.”

You can see what I’ve read, watched, etc on my all consuming page over at allconsuming.net.

All Consuming is another fine site brought to you by the Robot Co-op. It’s written in 100% Ruby on Rails, if I’m not mistaken.

I just realized how cool this is.

I’ve setup MSN Messenger (hey, it does the trick) on my dad’s PC in St. Louis. (meanwhile I’m many thousands of miles away out here in Phoenix)

Now, whenever he’s online, MSN Messenger pops up and he can see when I’m online. We chat all the time now.

Anyway - if you have the opportunity to get your parents setup with IM, I say go for it! (my mom still doesn’t have broadband Internet… I’ve been trying to explain to her for years how things like the Yellow Pages (you know, the dead-tree format), buying newspapers to lookup movie times, etc. etc. are all obsolete now.)

Gada.be - a meta-cool search engine by Chris Pirillo and co. Been meaning to blog about this for a while (you may have catched it in my del.icio.us links). Obligatory narcissim: shanti-braford.gada.be.

Why Ruby on Rails - because, sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words =)

memeorandum - getting a lot of buzz lately. the interface is still a little too confusing (or just not appealing?) to me.

Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us was interviewed on Joho the Blog.

Things that I’m glad to hear from the interview:
- private bookmarking coming
- group-based bookmarking and the ability to subscribe to a ‘moderated’ tag (subscribing to just a tag, i.e. ‘ajax’, is fairly useless due to too much noise)
- how del.icio.us scales
- lots of other goodies!

Apparently sablog.com is worth $29,356.08 at the time of this writing (lol):

If you believe the numbers spit out by this site… I have a bridge you might be interested in buying, real cheap.

Remember mailing lists? Email? That old thing… yeah.

You can now get my dispatches from the garage, delivered direct to your email box.

It’s pretty simple. Just signup using the form below: