Ride of my Life

Starting up a company is so interesting. It’s so challenging. it’s so stressful. It’s so time-consuming. It’s so gut-wrenching. It’s so intense. It’s so emotional. It really is like the stupid cliché suggests: like a roller coaster. Any real entrepreneur would agree with me: starting up a company is not easy.

But nonetheless, I still love it. The hills we have to climb, the challenges we must overcome, and the problems we’re forced to solve…..

…..it’s pretty much what I live for.

I live for it. Plain and simple.

Embracing these challenges and learning to conquer them is so much fun. And when I say fun, I don’t mean the type of “fun” i’d use to describe a game of Uno, or a match of tennis. It’s the “i’m-gonna-go-after-this-30-foot-wave” type of fun. You can either go after it, catch it, ride it, and have one of the most exhilarating experiences of your life. Or…..you can go after it, mess up, and get your face smashed into the sand (or coral reef) as you start flailing aimlessly to try to reach the surface, but the force of the water continues to pin you to the ground and you can only hope that you’ll have the lung capacity to outlast mother nature (sorry for the run-on sentence). I guess it’s just a big-cahuna-entrepreneur type of fun.

My wife wouldn’t call it fun at all. Being married to me is hard. She’s so patient. She’s so understanding. Due to the risks of a start up along with the sometimes necessary sacrifices of a founder in a start up, it sometimes puts her in a difficult spot. She’s awesome though. Life would be miserable if I didn’t have such a supportive wife. This company certainly won’t be the last I start. So i’m glad to have such an awesome wife.

Anyway, work these days just seems to be getting busier and busier. The last couple weeks have especially been crazy. Last weekend I was able to actually have a relaxing weekend with my wife and some friends, do some activities, get my mind off work….as best I could. I needed to be rejuvenated. Other than that, I can’t remember the last day that I haven’t at least spent 14 hours a day on work. Recently all i’ve been doing is working from 9:00am till 1am. I don’t see that slowing down for awhile. There is always so much more to get done. By the time I finish a task, 5 more are already added into the qeue. It feels so good to cross something off on a list. Done. Yet it’s sometimes painful to see that list only getting longer. Not done. I wish there were more hours in the day. Either that or I wish I didn’t need as much sleep. It’s tough.

One thing I just noticed is that I have more than a 1000 items I need to catch up on in my Google Reader (btw, I love google reader and I love all the blogs I subscribe too). And crazy thing is that it’s only been 3 days since I was last caught up with it. I got caught up over the weekend.

Anyway, i’m happy with Zinch, what we’ve accomplished and where we’re going. Very happy. The challenges will come, as many already have. The triumphs will come, as many also already have. It’s a lot of fun. Sometimes I stop to think how young I am (23) and where i’d otherwise be (Princeton). I think of that type of education verses this type of education. There is no question that i’d choose this type (real life experience of starting and growing a company) of education over that type anyday! Any day! Sometimes I catch myself talking about terms and using business language that a year ago I wouldn’t have even recognized existed. The education and experience goes so far beyond that…I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Starting up a company isn’t easy. But i’m certainly having a great time.

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Trinity (TX) laterals their way to a Division III win. 15 laterals and two minutes later……victory. It reminds me of the classic Cal vs Stanford game (the band is on the field!). At least in the game below the trombone player didn’t get owned on. :)

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That little fella is just straight up big pimpin. Hats off to that.

This family is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Literally.

The drainage system for an apartment building. Very creative. But stinky i’m sure.

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I’m not gonna lie, I think the 15 billion valuation of facebook is outrageous. Absolutely crazy. For those of you who haven’t yet heard, Microsoft has invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in facebook, giving the screech-look-alike-nerd-boy’s company a valuation of $15 bil. Microsoft also get all the rights to their 3rd party advertising. The valuation is absurd.

It’s funny how it ended up being Microsoft. The baldy Ballmer himself said a few months back how Facebook was just a fad and that it wasn’t anything special. “There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years,” he says. It’s 100% true. I just think it’s funny how it was his company that ended up closing the deal.

The other day Boom Town’s Kara Swisher ripped on Facebook saying how childish most of the facebook apps are. At first I thought she was way off. But when I created a fake user to test out dozens and dozens of apps (cuz I didn’t wanna contaminate my real profile), I was surprised to see how dead-on Kara was with her assessment. I agree with her 100%. The apps built on facebook are, for the most part, for kids. In other words, absolutely pointless, only to keep you there to waste more and more time. You’d see these apps in ToysR’us, on Saturday morning cartoons, or on the back of your happy meal. I bet my nieces and nephews would love it. For real. Zombies. Vampires. Pet dragons. Oh yeah, not to mention a place to Pop Ur Zit. It’s ridiculous. I think it’s time Zucky and the facebook crew grow up (along with the developers making the toddler toys).

Not only are most of the apps absolutely pointless and infantile, most of them aren’t even used!!! Tim O’Reilly gives a pretty good account of how the long tail concept applies. There are more than 5000 apps developed on facebook’s platform. His report shows that 87% of the facebook application usage goes to only about 1% of the total facebook apps. Very interesting. Sounds to me like apps aren’t being disseminated through the platform very well. Not even Facebook’s $10 million fund to build more apps will solve this problem. It’ll only make the disparity that much greater. How sad.

I know, I know…i’ve been ripping on my fellow ivy league drop-out pretty harshly. I apologize. But the fact remains, Marky-boy should name his first child “Google.” Had it not been for that monster being involved in the bidding (threatening to spank Microsoft where it hurts, again), there’s no way the valuation would have reached what it did.

I’m not gonna lie: I use facebook regularly. I like it. It’s useful for a lot of things. It’s a great way to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues. But by no means am I an obsessed fanboy like Scoble. And by no means did it deserve that kind of valuation. I’m sorry if I hurt feelings…i’m just saying it the way it is.

Well Mark, I bet it feels pretty good to individually now be worth about $5 billion (it’s estimated that he owns 30% of fb). That’s more than Jerry and David got over at Yahoo. Yikes.

Either facebook is helping push valuations through the roof for all of us (thanks guys, sealing envelope to send christmas card as we speak) or they’re just sharpening the sword that’ll ultimately cause the bubble to burst. I’m not sure which it’ll be yet. Probably both. It’ll all be about timing. Only time will tell.

Sweet dreams Zuck. I bet that pillow’s feeling softer than normal tonight.

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I love refs. They put up with so much crap from players. In high school, I played basketball and soccer. I never was a huge whiner or complainer with refs, but I had a lot of teammates who were. I think this picture is so funny. If only more refs were like this….all that whining in games probably wouldn’t happen.

This is just a funny pic and I think it looks cool.

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Apparently a Japanese woman has created a sort of “reversible” skirt/kimono for girls to use late at night for safety. She says it’s good to use when you’ve got creepy dudes following you home. You just pull a couple strings, unravel some cloth….and vwala, there you have your fake vending machine outfit. I’d be interesting to see if it really does thwart off strangers.

I wouldn’t normally have shared something this random except for that fact that it fits right into Halloween and i’m still looking for a costume. If I could get my hands on one of these…i’m pretty sure i’d use it as my costume. However, I don’t think they’re available for the public yet.

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So i’m kind of a design geek. I read design/art blogs all the time. So I ran into these pics recently and I thought they were pretty impressive.

“The work of Chris Gilmour [more pics here] provokes surprise and amazement beyond what could appear to be a mere process of reproduction.”

This stuff is pretty cool. Very cool.

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Recent print ads done by Lego are below. I love legos. These pictures are exactly the way I remember legos. I played with legos my entire life. I even remember going on a date a couple years ago (before I got married) where the date activity was to play with legos. It was so much fun. I think I remember going with Joe and Taylor and their dates too. I believe Rachel was my date (now my wife). We had a competition of what couple could build the best lego mansion. I pulled the boxes of legos out of my parents’ garage and away we went. It was straight up legolicious. And yup, me and my date won that competition.

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This was part of the “Diary of an Entrepreneur” column that I do for Launch Utah (a magazine for Utah Entrepreneurs). This was published a few weeks ago….but I figured i’d share it here.

My wife hates me. Well … almost. If I’m not working at the Zinch offices, I’m at home working on Zinch. If I’m not working on Zinch at home, I’m blabbing my wife’s ear off talking about Zinch. And if I’m not blah-blah-ing about Zinch, I’m certainly thinking about it, non-stop.

We recently painted the walls of our condo. My wife wanted a sage green for our bedroom. Somehow, someway, it turned out to be a Zinch green. Our main room was to be a light blue, the paint gods couldn’t resist. It turned into Zinch blue.

Consciously, sub-consciously, and whatever-heck-else-consciously, my life has been zinchified. As cliché as it is real: I eat, breathe, and sleep Zinch. Every morning I wake up bouncing off the walls and excited to get to work. Oddly enough, that’s usually after I’d spent the previous night tossing and turning, excited and thinking about Zinch.

Do you think I’m crazy? You probably do. Now mix me in with a handful of other incredibly passionate (if not more passionate) individuals. You’ll get quite the concoction: The Zinch team. Passion fills our veins. Smiles fill our faces. In my opinion, that’s why we’ve come so far in such a short period of time. There’s absolutely no substitute for passion.

I love every second of this dream ride, building a company from the beginning. It beats the heck out of studying in some dark, gothic, Hogwarts-like building back at school in Princeton, New Jersey. It really wasn’t that tough of a decision for me to take time off from Princeton to start something as unknown, untouched and unbelievable as Zinch. You might ask why? I’d put it back on you and say why the heck not? I love this! Life is way too short for me not to follow what I love and what I’m passionate about.

I think everyone needs to feel this passion. It’s a passion that makes your body shake, like you’re about to explode. You feel the desire. You feel the intensity. You feel the energy. There aren’t enough hours in the day, enough sun rays in the sky, enough processing power in the mind. Sometimes it can be stressful, but if this power is harnessed right, it’ll leave you with nothing but a smile on your face and a capacity to produce greater results.

Every single day, you are doing what you love instead of, well, just doing what you do. Every single day, you embrace the challenges instead of shy away from them. Passion fuels hard work. Passion is the painkiller when things go wrong.

If you don’t have that love, that passion, that excitement for what you’re doing … it might be time to hang up the jersey and to consider doing something else. Find what you love and do it. Passion is key to getting over those walls of failure, disappointment or distraction. It keeps you up on sundown and it gets you up on sunrise. Do what you love, don’t just love what you do. There’s no substitute for passion.

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I read this the other day and was amazed: I heart Zappos.

Is this something your company would do? Did Zappos do this just for PR and to get attention? Though Zinch is a tech company and circumstances like this don’t happen everyday for us, i’d hope to think we’d act in a similar way that Zappos did. It’s not for the attention or to try to look good. It’s simply because as a company, we care. That’s the bottom line.

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