fluxcapacity

Welcome to fluxcapacity.  My name is Adam Herscher, and less than 2 weeks ago I left my job at Microsoft to start something new with my friend and former research project partner, Jeff Powers.

For years, we've been quietly sifting through the massive amounts of essays, books, blogs, movies, speeches, magazines, and personal experiences about starting something, while at the same time continuing to gain experience and  refine our own ideas until the time was right to dive in and make a go of it.

That time is now, and we're excited to use this space over the coming months to share our thoughts and adventures in building a software company together from the ground up.

So, where are we today?  We've moved a combined 3,000+ miles to crash at my parents' pad in Los Angeles, California, where we've appropriated some killer office space and set up shop.  We've been the lucky recipients of an unused long wood dinner table that makes for a fantastic work bench, an old warped but large whiteboard originally destined for whiteboard heaven, and are intently scoping craigslist for deals on used office chairs.

We've been here 5 days, and have spent 5 days coding, and are up to a codebase of roughly 9,438 lines (including code, comment, and blank lines across .cs, .cpp, .c, and .h files), minus whatever Jeff has yet to check in today.  For fun, we've decided to chart the size of our codebase over time on the right-hand side of our blog (which we realize is hardly a measure of anything other than new lines of code written minus lines of code refactored away, and thus we'll likely enhance at some point to perhaps take into account delta rather than quantity).

Questions we've discussed recently include:

• When to seek out investment and from whom/how much
• How many people to hire, how quickly, and whom
• Which technology stack(s) to build on (LAMP vs WISC most notably)
• What/when/how much to release (in terms of information/blogging, product, code)
• Which interfaces to develop and prioritize (web? pc/mac/linux clients? mobile web? mobile j2me/.net? sms? iphone? facebook? gadgets/widgets? apis?)

We'll likely blog about our thoughts on these topics and quite a few others over the next few weeks, and as time progresses begin to share details of what we're actually trying to build.