Please forgive the lack of a post yesterday, I skipped my usually walk and writing combo and went into work early instead. I double posted Tuesday with a quick update on garagedollar going live. Keeping a rhythm of writing daily riffs is a style and form that works well for me. I find daily blogging is a great habit for a host of reasons*.

I’m at the doc this morning getting my back examined. I decided to get checked out after a marathon of pain 3 mile walk with my wife yesterday evening. That type of walk is normally a few moments of relaxation for me, but felt like an eternity of effort. I listened to my body’s warning signals, “somethings outta whack”, and am hoping the specialists can figure out what’s wrong. My main objective is to ensure my pain isn’t a sign of something more serious. I just heard back and my bones are all in the right place. My X-rays were clear, so it’s likely soft tissue damage (injured muscles), which is comforting news.

Looking forward to getting back to my normal state of health and high functionality asap. There is work to be done! Jesse Ventura captured my sentiment best from the Predator, “I ain’t got time to bleed”.

Notes:
*= regular blogging is great for developing stronger communication and writing skills. I highly value connecting with folks who share my enthusiasm for startups, web dev, and the evolution social technology.

I’d like to introduce you to a secret weapon for anyone having a moving or yard sale, GarageDollar.com. We believe the bulk of the classified market can and will be tied to location and interest. With GarageDollar we’d like to offer the first interface that caters specifically to folks who are looking for sales in there area, or people that wish to broadcast their sale to other shoppers in there area. If you’re looking for sales in your area simply type in your town or state(i.e. New York State), or see all sales by entering USA. Click a sale marker for more information. If you’d like directions to a sale simply click “Get Directions” on the bottom of the sale information box.

*update*: We are experiencing some issues with Internet Explorer at the moment, please be patient or try it out with another browser (Safari, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium)

If you’re outside of the US we haven’t forgotten you,  once we’ve refined the application we’ll reach out to global moving sales.

Cardboard signs and classified sections don’t stand a chance against GarageDollar!

One of my professional goals is to extract every ounce of productivity from each day. Unfortunately, I’ve allowed my health and fitness to take a back seat to work. This is a common problem for tech folks who work long hours and have little time to balance exercise and diet. This post is a wake up call to myself and a friendly reminder to folks who become so focused on one goal that they ignore their health. When you’re younger you may get away with ignoring your body. Now that I’m in my later thirties, I understand how and when my body and mind perform at peak efficiency, but have allowed my fitness to slip.

Keep Marching Forward, Each Step a Little Victory

My regular ten to fourteen mile morning walks have gotten a little tougher over the past year. I confess to adding significant extra padding, like a bear preparing for hibernation (30-40lbs). I skip breakfast during the week and eat a balanced lunch*. Long working days have lead to late dinners where I eat much more than I should. My wife’s a fantastic cook and baker which further increases the challenge of eating light.

Fitness is critical to productivity

Good health acts as an amplifier on all other activities. Concentration, drive, and effort are all at peak performance when we are fit. On the other hand, being less fit is a tax on every action. Between diminished enthusiasm and lethargy the cost is severe. On top of those costs, as fitness declines we become more prone to injury. I submit my lower back as a painful example.

Life Hacking

Maintaining fitness requires discipline, yet I have little in reserve after 15 hour days. I can clearly see where my daily habits go non-linear, leaving me with an opportunity to hack my own habits. The point in the day where I’m slipping (8pm) and dinner are the beach head I’ll target.

This week I’ll eat dinner earlier whenever possible, and in the cases when I can’t I’ll guzzle a pint of water before eating to trigger an earlier feeling of satisfaction. Beyond that I’ll squeeze in breakfast to shift my calorie consumption earlier and kick start my metabolism.

Notes:
*= a healthy lunch for me consists of a small sandwich, carrots, snack bar & fruit

A different kind of resume

I spent time this weekend taking an ancient resume in an aging doc format and making it into something which better represents my current interests and pursuits. I received some excellent feedback on design tips and signaling issues not long after I posted my current resume and the supporting source on github.

Signaling Efficacy and Target Audience

I’ll first address any signaling confusion brought up in reaction to posting the resume. Make no mistake, I want nothing more professionally than to breathe life into a new business, as it feeds into building a job I love. Many investors may want to know more about my background after a pitch, and this html5 “slide deck” fills that need. Besides having a URL as a business card feels more appropriate to the professional and cultural group I wish to work with.

In addition I’m certainly not above taking other gigs to survive while working on Victus Media’s latest project. It doesn’t benefit myself or the business to be in a position of desperation while negotiating with investors. They don’t care how needy I am. Product and pitch are all that matters. I’ve been reminded time and again that when our product is ready and the market is proven, investors will seek us out.

Design suggestions from friends

There’s an issue where one page is long enough to require a scroll button, which also grabs the mouse wheel up/down events. I spent time reorganizing and shuffling information, and debated disconnecting the mouse wheel from page navigation but settled on the current version. Using mousewheel down to read on, is a habit I couldn’t ignore.

If you see the resume load, you’ll notice the bullets slowly appear over a few seconds. That’s something most HR folks or Job Placement teams will loathe and lead to them skipping over the document. That flow is completely intentional. As I mentioned earlier, this document is designed for a specific professional and cultural group. If your job is to read hundreds of resumes a day, you’re not the audience I want reading it. The mantra of CouchDB sits very well with the theme of this fade in design, relax.

Being calm and focused is far more conducive to productivity, than being frantic and buried in busy work.

Who’s not investing?

A number of tech companies have significant cash reserves compared to their yearly costs and revenue. Microsoft, Apple, and Google all fall into this category with billions of dollars sitting in money markets or other liquid assets^. These highly profitable businesses are building huge stockpiles of cash instead of reinvesting it in their own business, purchasing other companies (M&A), or distributing it to shareholders through dividends. Let’s look at the motivations behind high profit companies sitting on mountains of cash.

There’s nothing good to buy

The most worrisome rationale for businesses hoarding cash is that there aren’t any good strategic purchases or internal investments. Instead of distributing the cash to shareholders these companies use large cash reserves as a form of risk management. In highly unpredictable markets, like today’s, when a company can’t make a decision for how to utilize capital, it defers to cash banking.

The cash theory is implemented by voting shareholders* to retain optimal future purchasing flexibility. This is done to snatch any rapid growth companies that could be potential market disruptors, competitors, or that compliment current product features fluidly. Because the company’s future is highly unpredictable, the corporation leverages cash as a way to hedge their bets.

Why stalled investment decisions hurt the economy

Consider a hypothetical example of a small village living in an arid region with only a handful of water wells.

The wells have all been privately discovered and the owners charge a tax on everyone who uses the water. The well owners become quite profitable because everyone needs water, and the owners fully optimize the distribution of water with brilliant aquifers maximizing their profit. The well owners have all grown wealthy and run out of investments for better water distribution leading to ever-growing reserves of gold and gems.

Word comes to town of mysterious shamans, who dance and foretell the coming of great rains. After one rain maker visits the village, a series of storms comes close enough to be seen. A heavy smell of rain is in the air, but none falls in the village. The wealthy well owners all grow deeply concerned because with rains comes an immediate drop in water prices, and an end to their businesses.

The well owners fiercely compete over hiring any rain makers they can find not to dance near their well. Some rain makers are good, but most have terrible track records. A little rain does fall, dropping water prices temporarily. The price of rain makers rises greatly and many come to the village promising not to dance for money and once paid, quickly depart.

Then more interesting news comes to the village. A neighboring town has developed a massive damn in a far off river to irrigate all their crops. The well owners realize that connecting these towns and having access to a river would destroy the water market. They quite rationally invest heavily in constructing a great wall between their village and the one with irrigation protecting the price of water.

You’ve got some ‘splaining to do Lucy

The well owners represent current high profit corporations with massive cash reserves. They do their best to maintain the value of their business, in the face of changing times. The rain makers are merely charlatans, who pretend to provide market value in hopes of getting purchased by paranoid and enormously wealthy corporations. The neighboring village has damn builders which symbolize startups which are actively developing new markets.

It’s not hard to see why the village’s local economy was broken. The most wealthy businesses were capable of sustaining themselves much longer than they should have. Long term optimization of a single form of business can seriously harm a local economy. Even worse, when resources are extracted from an economy and then sit idle, to wither under inflationary forces.

I’m not saying businesses or individuals can’t save mountains of cash. I’m saying we should look really hard at why they’re choosing to do so, and fix it.

Notes:
^= I would have added Intel but they purchased Mcafee for 7 billion dollars.

*= common stock shareholders voting rights are largely marginalized in modern corporate structures

My wife and I fiercely debated the merits of a potentially short term position that would help hone my web programming skills. Her position stressed that a new highly unstable job could vanish in a few months, and I’d sacrifice longer term unemployment. My counter position was that there are plenty of startups and companies that are in need of skilled developers. By living and breathing the web stack for even a couple of months while getting paid, I’d have the following benefits:

• I will vastly improve my marketability
• I can network with folks who are veterans of startups, fund raising, and business development
• both of these benefits will improve the success chances of startup projects I help bring to life (G$!)*

Since Michelle is spunky and extraordinarily determined I had to fall back on the crutch of Ben Franklin.
Ben’s thoughts on the subject:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

This was written by Franklin, with quotation marks but almost certainly his original thought, sometime shortly before February 17, 1775 as part of his notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly, as published in Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin (1818). A variant of this was published as:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

This was used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. (1759); the book was published by Franklin; its author was Richard Jackson, but Franklin did claim responsibility for some small excerpts that were used in it.
An earlier variant by Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1738): “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”

Notes:
*= G$ is my abbreviation for GarageDollar which on occasion boggles even my cofounder and Hacknical Guide Tyler. I strive to achieve complimentary strengths to my cofounder, while comprehending what technology he’s using and why. Understanding what modern web tools are capable of fuels my creativity for utility and interfaces. That means it’s my job to become completely comfortable with business development and marketing.

Most programmer types think that as long as their head and their hands are functioning they can crank out code. The past couple weeks have educated me that there is at least one other malady that can lay the most enthusiastic coder (without a laptop) low, and that devil is lower back pain.

I can’t sit down. Well, I can but it hurts like hell. The act of going from sitting to standing is excruciating. Getting out of bed each morning must look like a bionic man slo-mo or bullet time from the matrix to my wife. I feel about twice my age while moving about, each action is measured. I don’t move from a current satisfactory position unless the need is great.

After my lower back started aching two weeks ago, I went to see my doctor. He prescribed muscle relaxants and pain killers. I’ve used the muscle relaxants at night because they make me drowsy, and they seem to help me sleep comfortably.

I can’t relax, even on a couch
The problem is I can’t sit down and get any substantial development work done. It was a tremendous effort just getting node.js, connect, express and geo-couchdb installed over the last couple of days. Getting those tools setup is normally pretty trivial, but with an undercurrent of back pain, even the mundane becomes a trial.

The good news, with Tyler’s help I think I got through the setup phase last night and I might get a chance to learn a little more about Erlang, the language couchdb is developed in. Later after the Cheeseburger Summit in Manhattan today, I can begin tweaking the interface. The cheeseburger lunch is a meetup I was introduced to by Kevin Marshall, he who has mastered the one day hack. Looking forward to catching up with Kevin, Dave Pinsen, Orian Marx, and Scott C. I’m not thrilled to think about the train ride in. I’ll sit a little then stand the rest of the way in.

A break in the east coast rain

I think we’re just about done imitating Portland with respect to a rainy season (omg 3 days of rain). The reason I bring up a small city in the upper north west is that they have a fantastic tech and startup community. If a city Portland’s size (100k ish) can foster many hacker and tech conferences, why can’t other areas follow their lead?

There’s over 3 million people on Long Island although the people density ramps up as you get closer to Manhattan. We’ve got a handful of good universities (I can vouch for Stony Brook), and a number of tech companies, although not nearly enough dedicated to web development. So why is there absolutely no startup culture within 50 miles of my house?

I’m talking nothing, none, nada, zilch. There is it least one incubator that charges lower rent and provides some business guidance, but high value web tech companies aren’t exactly like eggs in need of a heat lamp. I can’t deny Paul Graham (YC) and Brad Feld (TS) have fostered some fantastic programs and given solid advice to would be businesses. But their secret sauce isn’t them. It’s the density and commingling of tech startups that attracts investors. The problem on Long Island is that most folks don’t even consider the remote possibility of building a tech startup.

The first problem is Manhattan. It sucks up anyone with a startup bone in their body. Don’t get me wrong I love the Big Apple, all my favorite tech/business meetups are there. But I’m a big fan of natural surroundings, peace and quiet. Silence in Manhattan is a rarity and grass is something you see only in park visits.

The second issue is no big super tech companies. We have Computer Associates instead of companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook. The churn of talented engineers that are fed up with management hierarchies organically feeds new startups which have a flat organization. If you can’t challenge your CEO to a ping pong match your org chart sucks.

A lack of successful tech entrepreneurs also is a hit against the area. Successful founder exits translates into tech savvy angel investors and advisors which fuels follow on startup generations.

We do have at least one solid university (Stony Brook!), but I’m pretty sure most grads from Stony Brook aren’t considering startups and business building as a way of life. It wasn’t something that came up too often. I do remember one group of friends that started a dial up Internet service company.

Each person we communicate with is unique, yet we share and are loosely connected by topics of interest. Instinctively we are drawn to communities that share our deepest desires. Leaders and trend setters pave the way for community formation by defining it’s core and identity.

Defining ourselves by what we love

Imagine a human abstraction which ignores social standing, location, native language, wealth, and fame. Instead this representation focuses only on interests and depth, individual style and persona, and as much background knowledge and expertise of a person as possible.

Organic Community Growth and Separation

This way of seeing people as intelligent decision engines with complex interwoven desires masks out all non-essential information to the problem at hand, seeking relevance. Fluid communication is the result of series of questions and answers orbiting a central topic. Perhaps a better analogy is like asteroids orbiting the rings of Saturn, which ripple with waves as moons soar past.

Layered discussions arise as elementary interests are brought together into cross topic molecules. The result is communication between the intersection of those groups (and) or between members of the separate communities (or). In this way compound topics are aggregated into new elements and elements are broken up into separate fragments. Topic granularity is a function of time varying interest, knowledge, and definitions of the crowd. Conflicts are easily settled by individual capacity to “fork” any element*.

Today’s Social Search

Our current methods of social search champion successful curators or popular people. It’s etched into our biology and being to seek masters in fields related to our survival and satisfaction. We are drawn to speakers who we perceive capable of enriching our lives with their generosity, knowledge, and resources^. Topical authority is earned by the individual, yet granted by the community.

Network Health Requires Intelligent Routing

As the social network of humanity matures, the amount of cumulative knowledge generated and curated within it increases. Even now, at this nascent stage of the social web, individuals are incapable of perceiving the information and opportunities that swell around them with respect to a hyperfine niche.

Eager problem solvers in universities, startups, and big corporations wrestle with algorithms to bring order to exponentially growing data**. I’d like to step back and study how information finds us, and how we personally judge relevance.

Why does specific information reach us? What shape and form of message are we most open to at a given time? Is there an upper bound to relevance? If relevance is uniquely defined by each individual, each algorithm must be tuned to each person^^.

Here are a few fundamental assumptions I believe are in common to the finest relevance solutions:

• Ultimately the user must be in control of the filter
• Understanding the dynamic social network and the individual is an iterative effort
• Time and location are tied to relevance. Solutions which take too long are penalized
• We should never be satisfied or settle for good enough when it comes to the quality of relevance

Notes:
*= thanks to git/github, open source, and historic processes for the forking analogy

^= In many instances of late, I’ve read the most potent ability of investors is their ability to introduce a new business to those mutually beneficial partners, be they follow on investors, new marketing channels, or customers. The network and introductions are proving more valuable and efficient than cash.

**= Brilliant folks are working to bring order to perceived chaos with semantic efforts, social search based on network interaction, feed subscription entities, and physical location. My6sense and my friend Louis Gray who’s their brand new VP, Hunch, and Google magic immediately come to mind. Facebook and Google ads, along with Amazon suggestions are also driven by relevance as a bottom line to performance.

^^= Supersets of algorithms may give more relevant suggestions at the cost of generality. Explore the million dollar Netflix suggestion algorithm prize for examples of this.

The 15 Second Pitch:

The bulk of the classified market can and WILL be tied to location and interest. With GarageDollar we will develop and execute this model at scale with optimal speed and efficiency

Mr. & Mrs. Money, Shake Up Your Thousand Dollar Pens and Get Ready to Swing for the Stadium Lights

I’ll be refining my pitch and knocking on doors until year end, or we lock in sufficient funds. Whoever you are, whatever stage of investing you specialize in, this is a deal not to be passed lightly. I strongly believe early investors take the greatest risk and deserve the greatest multiplier in successful outcomes. If you’re serious about investing and ready to talk, you can contact me anytime of day or night at messel at victusmedia.com or (six three one) 403-0178 and I’ll enthusiastically respond as soon as is humanly possible. I’m located on the east coast an hour out of Manhattan. I’m willing to travel to speak with eager investors.

The 60 Second Pitch

Victus Media is on the bleeding edge of web application development. I know there’s a market, I see it everyday I walk past cardboard signs, see a local newspaper listing, or craigslist moving sales (which are full of spam). This market is only going to grow with lean times. Rain or shine, towards the end of this year I’ll put funding out of my mind, and dive deep into product support and refinement with technical ninja and chief hacker Tyler Gillies. He eats backend servers for breakfast with Steel Technical Chops.

We can better serve this market.

Personal reasons for urgency, and renewed sense of doing One Thing

Old habits die hard

Fear of not having steady income gripped me when my day job vanished. With unemployment rates skyrocketing, and much of my expertise in an area I’m eager to move on from, the image of years of joblessness hit me like a punch in the gut. My wife, my home, my life all felt fragile and at great risk. What kind of man am I, if not self sufficient?

Forked Up Beyond All Recognition

I reflexively pinged my contacts and friends to see if they had any job opportunities matching my desired work area and skill set. Good news, a couple of friends had information about positions, one of which sounded like an excellent match to my interests (startup biz development). A job matching agency came across my HackerNews post, and requested a current resume.

My resume is gathering cobwebs (people still use them?) so I hacked together an updated version and sent it out. I should have been happy right? But something felt all wrong. Like deja vu, I was aware of a glitch in the matrix. These reactions were all the product of fear. Yielding to fear is the guy I used to be, not the man I’ve become. I’m hell bent on a mission.