This blog has been updated extremely infrequently, and now that our company has launched, we are going to move all posting to the official FriendFeed blog, which will be getting a lot more attention than this blog going forward. We will redirect the feed URL in a few weeks.

We have been getting a lot of colorful comments from friends about the lack of posts on this blog over the last two months. It is kind of difficult to blog about starting a company and keep the product we are working on secret at the same time. Well, next week the veil will come off our product and our master plan to, uh, revolutionize, erm, the entire industry of... Well, this is our basic plan:

We are in the middle of stage 1, and next week we will be opening the doors on FriendFeed. We will be launching the product in stages to make sure we work out all the bugs with more ambitious early adopters. After next week's launch, FriendFeed will be available by invitation only. Since all of you reading this blog are good candidates for "ambitious early adopters," if you sign up on the FriendFeed site now, we will make sure you get an invitation to the site the morning of our launch. We hope to open the site up completely soon thereafter, but our schedule will largely be determined by your feedback.

And no, we aren't telling people what the site is yet. You can theorize all you want based on the name... Community barbecue discussions? Socially enabled online pet food sales? Maybe, just maybe... We are looking forward to having all of you break our product next week, and we appreciate the fact you are still subscribed to this stale blog. We will start blogging regularly next week once we can talk more about the product we have been working on.

A couple weeks ago, we announced that Jim and I are starting our company as Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIRs) at Benchmark Capital. For those of you who are not familiar with the EIR role, Jim and I get an office at Benchmark for a few months where we can brainstorm, prototype, and evaluate new business opportunities. In addition to an office, we get access to Benchmark's expertise and connections to technology companies, and in return, we help Benchmark evaluate new companies flowing in. It is not like a round of funding — Benchmark doesn't own a stake in what we are doing, and they have no obligation to fund us later.

So why be EIRs instead of starting out completely independently? It was a complex decision. One thing you will find if you ever start your own company is that everyone has advice. In Silicon Valley, everyone has worked at a start-up in some capacity, so that advice comes in the form of mandates based on unsurpassed anecdotal experience. "Don't get venture capital. Trust me, when I was at Company A, we did, and …" "Talk to as many VCs as possible. Trust me, when I was at Company B, we didn't, and …" "Don't go into that industry, it overlaps with big Company X. Trust me, when I was at Company C, …" "Go into that industry because it overlaps with Company X, so then you can get acquired. Trust me, when I was at Company D, …"

If I learned one thing from the barrage of advice we got as we walked out the door of Google, it was that everyone's start-up experiences are unique, and anecdotal experience doesn't necessarily generalize well. However, everyone we talked to reinforced their conflicting advice with a couple of common observations:

• Due to the increasing maturity of open source software, cheap hardware, and search engine marketing, starting an Internet-based company costs less money than you would expect. Check out Joe Kraus's excellent blog post on the topic if you haven't already.

• Taking investment is a significant decision, and the form and amount of investment you take can dramatically change the path your company takes. VCs may have very different expectations than angel investors about the amount of equity they expect in return for money, and they may have different expectations about the timeline in which they expect a return. Due to the trend towards lower cost development, entrepreneurs have many more options today than they did in the 90s, and many companies today experimenting with less traditional forms of investment. My favorite example is Paul Graham's Y Combinator incubator, which invests just a few thousand dollars in extremely small teams that are often made up of college students.

In the end, it seems that success breeds happiness. Most of the bad experiences recalled to me in the form of advice-filled anecdotes sounded almost identical to the good experiences recalled to me from other people. It just so happened that the bad stories ended with no revenue and an investor coup, and the good stories ended with a product everyone uses and everyone making a lot of money. Different types of investment lead to different issues down the road, and different forms of investment work better for different companies. Let's hope that Jim and my advice ten years from now is colored by a happy ending :)

In the end, we chose to become EIRs primarily because we wanted to learn as much as possible before we make these complex decisions. We wanted to see the conversation the Benchmark partners had after a company pitch (Why did they care about different things than we did? What questions did they ask that we wouldn't have asked?). We wanted to see the relationship between a broad range of portfolio companies and board members before we find ourselves managing a relationship with our board. We wanted to expose ourselves to industries that we would have otherwise not looked at to pique our creativity as we develop our own ideas. There are lots of people with advice in the Valley, but none of it compares with the opportunity to see the issues play out first hand.

Also, the Benchmark office we have is a tad more comfortable than the bedroom in my house we would have used otherwise:

Bret's guest room

Benchmark office

I still tried to convince Jim that we should spend our first day in my garage so we could say "We started the company out of Bret's garage." Saying "We started the company out of a cushy office on Sand Hill Road" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

So did we make the right decision? I think so, but only time will tell. Ask me in a couple years, and I will have some strongly worded advice for you…

I have always had the entrepreneurial "bug." It's hard to describe to people who don't have it. Why give up a secure job at one of the most well-respected companies in the world? Why go from virtually guaranteed to success to searching the couch for change to buy servers for a product that few people may ever use? The answer to those questions is partially rational and partially irrational. It's like asking why a comic book collector wants to spend hundreds of dollars on a first edition of a comic book no one reads anymore. It's not just a financial investment — it's an investment in your happiness, an investment in your psychological well-being.

Jim and I both work at Google. Collectively, we have played a part in so many products and worked with so many amazing people at Google in the past four years, I have almost lost count. We worked on the incredible team that launched Google Maps. The Developer team I founded just celebrated a significant milestone, hosting Google's first ever global developer conference with over 5,000 attendees in 10 countries around the world. Jim was wrapping up an 8,500 line code review the day before he left. So why leave? Why now?

Well, the main reason is, as you may have inferred from my introduction, entirely personal — partially rational, partially irrational. Some people work to pay the bills. Some people work to achieve power. Some people, like us, are so passionate about creating things, the prospect of being able to create with no rules, no oversight, and no strings attached is just about the most appealing job in the world.

I woke up one day a few months ago in the middle of the night, frustrated with a number of aspects of my day-to-day job at Google, and I realized that the career path I was on was not for me. I was climbing the ladder — getting promoted, moving from "individual contributor" to "manager" (corporate speak for "doing less and less every day"), managing more and more products, and gaining more and more authority in what I consider to be the most exciting company in the world. Despite my ascent, I came home disenchanted most evenings, unable to express what was bothering me so much. I wanted to write code, make mockups — create again. But I liked defining product strategy. I didn't want to be a code monkey, a cog in a machine I had no control over (I had been there, and it was much worse). What I was craving was not the top of the ladder, but a completely different role: founder.

Founder is one of those funny, partially meaningless job titles that means something different to everyone in Silicon Valley. To me, it represents the opportunity to venture down paths larger companies are unwilling to explore, define markets that didn't exist before, take risks no larger company could bear. Thousands of times more risk, but commensurate reward if you manage to survive the process. Edge-of-your-seat decision making and products that have to be good, or you disappear completely — no product bundling or a marketing machine to fall back on. It is creating in its purest form.

Jim and I are starting this process after taking a couple weeks off to relax and complete the long list of personal errands we have been putting off for the past four years. A number of friends and family members requested we set up a blog or mailing list so they could get updates on our progress, which inspired this web site. You can subscribe to our feed. You can also get updates via email. We will probably post about once a week, and likely less as the company we are building gets going.