Startup Mullings

A Month in the Startup Life (Week 1)

In honor of my one month anniversary of full time entrepreneurship I’m going to do a series of posts chronicling my days for the past month. The goal is to provide a glimpse of startup life and share the lessons I’ve learned. One thing that was immediately noticeable was how quickly my time gets filled. I expected to have a lot more time to work on Glossi and it’s amazing how things I suddenly have to do. On a single day I will work on coding a new feature, learn about Amazon S3, meet with potential partners, and talk to customers. My workday has gotten longer but I have significantly more control over what I do and when I do it. This serves as a motivating factor for me and I hope I can resist falling into a routine.

Here’s the first week:

• 3/19 - This was my first Monday of not having a full time job in a long time. I purposefully kept the calendar pretty empty in order to catch up on a bunch of personal stuff.
• 3/20 - Scheduled a meeting with another startup CTO to grab a drink and get some scaling advice for Glossi. Signed up to teach two Skillshare classes (Excel and SQL) but still need to figure out a time and place. Went for a run in the afternoon to take advantage of my newfound freedom.
• 3/21 - Wrote blog post on when to leave the full time job to focus on a startup. Met with an old buddy of mine who’s also working on a startup. Discovered that we have some similar thoughts on article consumption and media. Went for a run in the afternoon. Did a bit of refactoring for Glossi.
• 3/22 - Had lunch at the Google office with an old coworker and was shocked by how nice they have it. After that, I spent the afternoon exploring NYC and taking some pictures. Ended up taking a break in Union Square park to do some reading, thinking, and writing. In the evening,  I went to a startup crawl and met up with two buddies. At night, set up a few meetings for the following week.
• 3/23 - Deployed the MongoDB/MySQL migration of Glossi and fixed minor issues that arose. Unfortunately I had to miss a scheduled lunch with former coworkers due to bugs that came up and wish I had timed the release better. We definitely need a better test and release process for Glossi but it’s been okay so far. Spent the afternoon working with the Glossi  cofounders and finished up our YC application.
• 3/24 - Worked on usability improvements for Glossi and wrote a blog post on overcoming the build bias. Discovered an issue with occasional MongoDB connections being prematurely closed and spent a bunch of time reading about PyMongo connection pooling.
• 3/25 - Figured out a hack to deal with MongoDB and Celery not getting along but need to go back and actually come up with a real fix. Went for a run in the afternoon. In the evening, grabbed a beer with one of the cofounders and another startup CTO to discuss startup life and share experiences and ideas.