fluxcapacity

A wise man once said:

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

And so has been the theme of month one. After roughly 9 months of sporadic brainstorming sessions about what our company might do should Jeff someday decide to stop pursuing his Ph.D. and I to leave my job, we chose on day 1 to table any further planning discussions and start hacking.

This continued for roughly 25 days (or 32,000 lines of code), at which point we were able to take a step back with a greater understanding than ever before of the beast we're attempting to tame -- what's easy? what's hard? what's been done before and what never has? how long should it take? what kind of people should we attempt to hire first and how soon? and so on...

We then decided to invest some time over roughly 3 days to revisit some of the "businessy" stuff. We jotted down all the company/product names that had been thrown out over time on our beat up whiteboard and evaluated them according to the nine dimensions suggested in the Igor Naming Guide, then discarded them all in favor of something else we came up with on a whim and decided we liked better.

We threw together 3 slides of the 10/10/15 that Guy, David, and Brad recommend, as a sanity check as to whether we could clearly and concisely articulate our vision/value. We explained what we were were building to a handful of friends in no more than 2-3 sentences, and listened to whether the response was a "What?" or a "Wow!", refining our vision down to a simple 5 words until the "What"s were no more.

As the weekend progresses and month 1 comes to an end, we're continuing to wrap up our first stretch of coding -- getting various disjointed pieces to fit together, grepping for BUGBUGs/TODOs, and ensuring we have something that works end-to-end however small in scope. Then it's on to another month of code, with a new set of goals.

In closing, I'll pose a question that's been on my mind lately to anyone out there who follows our journey:

How would you convey the value proposition of one of our favorite products, the Ambient Orb?

What kind of ROI can its customer expect by buying it?

What kind of pain does it eliminate?

Is it a vitamin, aspirin, or antibiotic (i.e. a luxury, nice-to-have, or need-to-have)?

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.