snikolha.us by J. Nikolaus Bauman

Next Chapter - Southland

2011-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

2 June 2011 – Los Angeles, CA

This week, in many ways, is an official beginning of the next phase of my life.

This week I’ve announced that I’m leaving Foodzie.

Foodzie has been an education. My experience over the past several years has changed me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Most of all I feel empowered. I feel like I have the tools to create a company with long lasting value. I know the road decently well enough to navigate and hug a few necessary turns. I can recognize a few pitfalls and dead-ends. I’m hungry to create something that is sustainable, lean, and exciting.

To my wife, Tara, my family in Virginia, all the mentors at Techstars, our investors, my cofounders and everyone who has ever worked with/for me: You helped me get here and I can’t thank you enough.

Now – lets do something cool in Los Angeles.

Do More Faster

2010-10-04T00:00:00-07:00

04 Oct 2010 – Los Angeles, CA

In the summer of 2008 I began a journey with two college friends that has undoubtedly changed my life. We were optimistic, bright-eyed and bushy tailed dreamers with nothing but a few collective years out of college and ambitions as big as they come.

When I went in to Techstars I was beginning my road as a first time entrepreneur. Everything was new and foreign: the idea of term sheets, how to engage mentors effectively, and setting achievable goals to move the business forward (and a million other things).

Techstars gave me a framework that logically introduced me to many of the concepts that one needed to consider when starting a company. They also surrounded us with other entrepreneurs and mentors that would give us honest feedback and share with us the tough stories of building companies and the things they learned.

It changed my life drastically. And in their official Techstars roles they have not only helped us, they have helped 58+ companies and counting. The people behind Techstars are entrepreneurs, investors, advisors and they live and breathe helping startups with a type of genuine fervor that I have rarely seen.

One of the most important concepts that I carry with me every day is to seek out others. People that have been where you are and can offer up some practical advice that you can immediately put to use. David Cohen, Brad Feld and those who have contributed to this book are those people. They have put together some very important lessons that entrepreneurs can relate to.

So, I’m enthusiastically plugging their book, Do More Faster. It’s the motto you’re introduced to on day one of Techstars and one that will never leave me. Get it, read it, and put it to use.

North Carolina Epoch, Coda

2010-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

24 Aug 2010 – Greensboro, NC

I can’t believe I’m leaving North Carolina in one week. My North Carolina pride is only second to my Virginia pride. It’s been my home for three dynamic years. So I’m taking a moment to catalog a few things I love about North Carolina before I disappear into The West.

Chapel Hill/Carrboro – I apologize, I didn’t contribute to your economy of live shows as much as I had hoped. Spotted Dog, I’m sure we’ll see each other again. Three Cups, thanks for providing me with such a well prepared coffee-fix time and time again. Neal’s Deli, keep those hot dog specials going!

Durham – I was only beginning to get to know you well. Rue Cler, I’m sure you did some damage to my cholesterol but every croque-monsieur was worth it. Counter Culture Coffee, you are an inspiring group of people and your coffee continue to lead the industry. I’m so happy I got to know you a little bit.

Raleigh – an old familiar place of family. Visiting Raleigh when I was a child was a rare and special event. Becoming closer to my family here has been wonderful. I’ll miss them dearly.

Greensboro – I’ve been pretty rough on you. But you should know that I have very high expectations. You have some pretty fantastic cheesecake but your coffee blows; work on that one. Serving Counter Culture in two locations is a start. Fishbones and Sticks and Stones, I will miss you. Scott, Scott, Carine, Logan and all my  friends will be terribly terribly missed.

So… with one week left, how many Cook Out watermelon milkshakes and cheddar style burgers is it acceptable to consume when grieving my imminent loss of North Carolina?

People Say Never Forget

2010-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

16 Apr 2010 – Greensboro, NC – my mind in Blacksburg, VA

All we could do was wait and listen to the sirens. We were scared. There was no information other than “there is a shooter on campus. Stay away from windows,” and the increasing body count. Mobile phone communication silenced by an overwhelmed network.

I doubt I will forget that.

Instant messaging Tara, my best friend and partner, while she was in and out of connectivity hiding in a stairwell with others. Every time her connection dropped, I was literally dizzy. This seemingly happened for hours but realistically probably minutes.

No, I probably won’t forget that.

The news conference broke the silence. We were given a story, timeline, numbers, and the horror was realized. Thousands were brought closer over losses we could barely imagine.

I won’t forget that either.

But most important to this Virginia Tech alumnus, on April 16th, I won’t forget to celebrate being alive and know that you and I are lucky.

Over Generalized Startup Advice, Issue 1- Pros and Cons

2009-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

28 Nov 2009 – Overly Romanticized Home Office in Greensboro NC

When our company was in its infancy (we’re approaching toddler stage now) I thought a lot of decisions carried more weight than they actually did. Often times the pros and cons of certain situations were weighed endlessly and, as it is bound to do, it often comes out in the wash.

Of course, some decisions will be meaningful.

But in a startup, you make an ass-load of decisions a day. For me, when first embarking on this company building experiment, many decisions had a heightened perceived importance.

Sometimes we got emotionally invested in many of them (especially if one of us had already invested some sweat into one of the options). In reality, most of them don’t mean a thing. It’s your determination and drive that makes you keep going when your decision is the wrong one that matters.

If you’re starting a business now and your struggling with a decision (and my bet is, you are) do whatever it takes to move forward. Often a best case scenario: forcing yourself to get creative and execute all choices. It’s way more important to have a quicker pace at which you test your ideas than it is to make the right decision.

Lean Ecommerce with Magento - 25 Aug 2009

2009-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

25 Aug 2009 – Greensboro NC, San Francisco CA, and numerous other locations

It’s been over a year since myself, Emily and Rob left our jobs to focus on Foodzie full time. I haven’t written extensively on what we’ve learned or the choices we’ve made over the past 12 months because things are happening so fast I’ve hardly had a chance to sit back and digest everything that we’ve done and learned. But we have some big things coming soon that I wanted to share.

At Foodzie, we started talking to our customers on day 1. We began building a prototype tailored directly to the problems of food producers. We built a lot from scratch in Ruby on Rails because there was nothing out there that would be able to work perfectly for our customers. We worked directly with producers to get feedback and design our product. We were able to move very quickly validating a number of product concepts. We used our application to raise funding. We used it to build our customer base. Our product and our team stayed very lean.

We wrote our own shopping cart. We wrote our own CMS. We wrote our own checkout logic. As we looked down the road at features we were going to have to build, we decided it was time to take a different approach.

Gandalf said, “All you have to decide is what you’re going to do with the time you are given,” and that’s very much how we feel at Foodzie. The Foodzie team has better places to put our focus than on building ecommerce features that are already out there ready to be leveraged.

Recently we’ve been working on switching our commerce application to an open source ecommerce platform called Magento – an platform with an amazingly large community. I’m happy to say that it’s going live very soon with a new design and many more robust features for our customers.

Now the entire infrastructure of our app is based on an open source project; I can’t tell you how good that makes us feel. We’re thrilled to be joining the Magento community and look forward to giving back.

The adoption of the Magento platform is going to allow us to spend more time learning from and improving our product for our customers. We look forward to this next technological chapter of Foodzie as we continue to provide an unparalleled experience for buying and selling the best artisan food online.

Look for more soon!

BTYW

2009-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

05 Jul 2009 – Greensboro, NC

My week was better than your week, because I found this:

for more visit @autotunethenews

Floyd Fandango is Beer Wine and Music

2009-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

03 Jul 2009 – Greensboro, NC

Our Fourth of July plans rock this year. When we were living in Blacksburg, one of our favorite events was Wine Down the Music Trail. It was a day of blue grass and… uh, wine. In the fall we always seemed to miss Floyd Fandango which was the cousin beer festival.

This year they’ve combined both events over two days with camping. YES!

A friend had this to say:

redacted: VA is starting to really get a lot of good breweries.
redacted: Hit Blue Mountain Brewery for their Evil8. Do it early in the morning.
redacted: It’s a breakfast beer.

Here is the full brewery list.

Image captured and hosted by Aviary.com’s awesome image capture.

It's summer

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

30 Jun 2009 – Pelham, NC

It’s summer.

And Tara’s got a new book.

Welcome to the real world!

2009-06-18T00:00:00-07:00

18 Jun 2009 – Philadelphia International Airport

My recent sucky travel experiences reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share this nugget of joy from a trip to NYC last year:

This was the login screen for internet access at The W. I guess they’re telling me that in the real world, people are expected to pay for things.

What I learned at work

2009-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

4 April 2009 – Durham NC

Callbacks are grand.
1st gen macbook airs are severely limited. I keep running into the limitations of 2gb of ram. I didn’t think this would be an issue since all I’m doing is developing web apps. Naive is me.
The following is a great error message. Whoever is responsible for this, I was a witness to Clinton Nixon promising to buy you a beer.

Could not find the source association(s) :favorite or :favorites in model Pick.  Try 'has_many :favorites, :through => :picks, :source => <name>'.  Is it one of :product or :member?

What I learned on the plane

2009-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

17 Mar 2009 – 30,000 feet

I’ve been using git a lot recently but probably only about 10% of it; just enough to enable me to do what I need in order to manage several different lines of development. The Rubyist has a few git tricks in it that I really like. Here are a few that were new to me.

Your local git history is called the reflog

You can find individual commits locally by specifying the branch and a time:

$ git show master@{yesterday}

Or go back in sequence:

$ git show master@{5}

The rev-parse command, returning the SHA value of the commit:

$ git rev-parse master 
671d9744cdfc8cd98fc7a3c31fac394ae7f564a9

Handy.

Foodzie is taking notes

2009-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

14 Mar 2009 – Austin TX

@SXSW, and taking some notes sporadically. First session was particularly apt for note taking. All of my notes will be added here: Nik’s Notes

The slides from individual sessions will def be more informative than my notes, but perhaps these will be useful to someone…

Cheers.