fluxcapacity

Tonight we headed to the Twiistup 2 event in Venice, held at the "Air Conditioned Supper Club."  On the inside, it's a two-room bar with padded walls and a small stage.  AOL, apparently a main sponsor, had a primary spot on stage and was giving out T-shirts, which were catchy but unfortunately made significantly less cool by the non-subtle AOL branding.

We met some interesting people at the event.  There were a number of "showoffs," or companies with small demo booths set up.  One of the attending companies just created this realtime-social-product-browsing-map-thing, and I definitely took the opportunity to ask one of their employees what the feature was all about.  I still don't actually know how it's useful, but apparently it's addictive.  See if you can figure it out.

The event left us with three questions:

1. What's with the padded walls?
2. Was I the only person there without an iPhone?
3. Did we just hang out with Bono, lead-singer of U2?

Two minutes after we stepped in, I was interviewed by Bonny (of NoodleScar fame) while Adam ran away and took this photo.  The inverview touched on the conundrum of the padded walls, whether the microphone actually worked, and whether Adam and I had made it out of the 'garage' at all during the past few weeks.  I was a less than exciting subject, so we'll see if they squeeze anything out of it.

Update: Lan just informed us that the NoodleScar episode is up.  A brief clip of me did make the cut.  Does this mean I can join the SAG?

So, Bono? You be the judge.  We scoured the event's website, and noticed a reference to "surprise guests."  Hmm.  The best evidence we have is the following photo snapped with Adam's camera:

 I'm fairly certain this is fake Bono.  Seriously, the earlobes are off and this guy's chin is a little too dimply.  Adam thinks he's the real deal.  Or at least he was certain until we zoomed in on the ears a little more.  In any case, the host knows, so maybe she'll tell us tomorrow.

We also just noticed that our blog's sweet header somehow scored prime placement on the Twiistup homepage: 

About me: I sleep on a futon -- in my office -- somewhere in Los Angeles. I have no car, at least not within 2000 miles. My current income is zero. I have maybe three friends in a 30-mile radius. The decision to start something put me into this situation, and it also meant passing on several jobs, and breaking directly out of grad research at college.

Like a lot of people, I have ideas about technology. What it could do and should do versus what it does do. This gap creates a sort of urge to jump in and help fix the situation. With positive polling feedback from friends and family, it became clear there was a small influx of ideas that could be tied together to help solve a real problem. And now we will spend the next several months validating a concept and helping to solve this problem. The space is fascinating, but really, it’s less about this exact problem and more about that urge to jump in. That said, we didn’t have to drop everything and start this, there were other options. I could do some of this at a university, but it’s more satisfying and challenging to create for a broader audience. We could start this after-hours, but the probability of success is lower, and we need every ounce of that already-low-probability to have a reasonable expectation of success. I considered some jobs with a high innovation quotient, where they are really exploring new waters. But even in the best cases, personal impact would be shielded, and I presume it’s somewhat more exciting to be a captain than a crewmate on any expedition.

Our status is incrementally nudging up the code ticker (generally speaking not by just hitting ‘enter’ all day), and taking periodic breaks from that to draft-architect parts of our system. We also attended our first business-related-social-gathering last night with some local geeks, which is where the inset photo originates.

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.