Life has been extremely busy since my return from New York last week. First off, the trip went very, very well. Every meeting I had planned in advance went better than I expected, and even a few cold calls brought back good memories of the starting days of CanGoogleHearMe.com. Showing up, facing a security guard, being rejected by a secretary; this seems to be the pattern that starts many of my adventures.
Regardless, the expense of going to New York was absolutely worth the trip, and I've come back more confident than I was before. It's amazing how many doors can be opened by a willingness to be genuinely enthusiastic about what's going on around you.
Unfortunately, we're still not ready to talk about anything yet. We're in the process of getting our ducks in a row, figuring out who and what we're working with. The delayed posts result from the sad truth that between doing something that directly helps the project and making a blog post, the direct action tends to win. The consequence is that the more that's going on, the more likely I am to skip the blog posting for the day.
It is absolutely fair to say that we've been showing up every day in the early morning, and working every day until late at night, and never once have we found ourselves wondering what to do next; things are moving at a crisp pace.
Also, we've moved into our office this last week, pictured above. Our move corresponded to the office building's grand opening, where we had a chance to meet the mayor, some people from different VC groups, and some executives from Micron, not to mention a fellow that makes documentaries for a living. Very fun. The photo above makes the room look very dark, partly because we had to cover the windows in order to keep glare off our screen. We stripped my home office of my glass desks, Paul's wife made us curtains, and poof - an office, at least for now.
Possibly more important to the project, we had a chance to meet Dan this weekend. Dan is a masters student in Florida that's likely going to be joining us on the project for the summer. He was looking for data for his masters work, came across us while researching Pandora, and gave us a call.
It turns out our work may be mutually beneficial to each other, so he flew out to Boise this weekend to shake hands, be interviewed, and generally get a feel for what life in Boise would be like. Very nice guy. Sadly, we forgot to take a picture of him aside from video - which I don't want to take the time to pull right now - and so you'll have to wait a bit before you get a picture of him. In the mean time, Dustin has been crashing through some of the interface conversion, and we'll most likely be rolling out a new beta interface in a few days, at least for testing. This is a bigger thing than you think, because it means we're free to start playing with all sorts of other tools, and moves us one step closer to implementing user accounts that let you favorite your books, etc. This also means we'll have something for our internal testers to start playing with very soon, hopefully.
Anyway, that's enough of an update for now. I've got to get back to work. As I like to remind everyone - we're having fun. And plan to continue doing so.
Aaron
