Moving to the Bay Area

I have always read that San Francisco/Silicon Valley was the optimal location for startups, but as an outsider and native Texan, I never wanted to believe it. After visiting Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, attending Y Combinator’s Work at a Startup event in Mountain View, and ultimately taking a job with a cool new mobile web startup in San Francisco, I must concede that the Bay Area is indeed an ideal place to be for ambitious tech startups.

Just a photo I took while walking to lunch one day…

The optimism and proximity to VCs and talent are the Bay Area’s main draws. Some of these well-funded startups work on ideas that would get ignored or misunderstood almost anywhere else. As far as talent goes, almost everyone I talked to at the YC event went to school at Stanford, Berkeley, or some other university in the area (or even as far as MIT in one case), but startup founders, recruiters, and investors, for the most part, seem to value hard skills, culture fit, and attitude over pedigree.

Fred Wilson sums up the Bay Area fairly concisely:

For all the benefits of Silicon Valley, like density of great engineers and VCs, you have negatives like hypercompetition for talent and the creative cost of living in an echo chamber.

In my humble opinion, the only reason not to be in the Bay Area is if recruiting or fund raising isn’t on the to-do list. Otherwise, I think it’s somewhat telling that all the Googles and Facebooks seem to end up here.

Of course, location isn’t everything by any means, and there are other viable hotbeds like NYC or Seattle. I used to think location didn’t matter for internet-based startups at all whatsoever, but there are some definite advantages to being in a hotbed like the Bay Area.

Also, if you’re out here too, drop me a line and we’ll definitely have to meet!

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Surfer Blood

I haven’t updated in a while so I figured I would toss up a song. Here’s “Take it Easy” by Surfer Blood, a band I saw live a few months ago and really liked. Their sound is really growing on me.

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Burgers and Vineyards

Earlier this week, my family visited some relatives that live in Roseville, CA (just outside Sacramento). We were on the way to Silicon Valley for a Y Combinator event I will write about in a later post.

A view from the car on the drive out to Sonoma, CA.

The visit consisted of lots of good food and wine tasting since my aunt is a gourmet cook and my uncle is a wine connoisseur. I’m not a big wine guy, but some of the wines my uncle had I actually really liked. They took us to a few wineries in the Sonoma/Napa area, where the views of the hills and vineyards are amazing. I wish I had a better camera to really capture them.

We also insisted on having them take us to an In-N-Out, which turned out to be an equally worthwhile experience in a different kind of way. I keep hearing rumors that a new location is coming to Garland, TX, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Overall, it was a great vacation, and my cousins are cool and fun to hang out with. I hope to visit more often!

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Rangers Ballpark/Foursquare

I downloaded Foursquare to finally give it a trial run as I went out to the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington last night with a friend. Attendance was low because the weather looked like it would take a turn for the worse, but thankfully it never did. It actually turned out to be as perfect a night for baseball set in the middle of a Texas summer as you could possibly ask for.

Rangers win over the Mariners 12-2.

I have always been curious to see the latest location-based ‘social’ networking craze, Foursquare, in action. The first thing I noticed was how few users were ‘checked-in’ at a MLB game, where, regardless of the weather, tens of thousands of people are. I also didn’t get what I should do with these strangers that were now neatly organized on my iPhone. While Twitter can be interesting and Facebook utilitarian, Foursquare is boring!

Why is Foursquare hyped up so much? The funny thing is, shortly after I uploaded the above photo to Facebook, a group of my friends who were also at the game called me wanting to meet up. Facebook could easily render Foursquare dead in its tracks, yet here we are being told Foursquare is the Future of Social Networking when it clearly won’t be.

Anyway, the Rangers blew out the Mariners by a season-best 10-run victory margin. After the game, my friend called in to The Ticket’s overly analytical post game show, Diamond Talk, and we couldn’t stop laughing as they turned his nonsensical ‘question’ into a ten-minute in-depth analysis on the long-term outlook of the Rangers’ bullpen. I have mounds of respect for those guys.

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This Is Happening

I think it’s a safe bet that LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening will be one of the best albums of 2010. Stream or download “All I Want,” my personal favorite, below:

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Shame, Shame

Dr. Dog’s new album Shame, Shame is all I’ve been listening to lately. It’s really good. Here’s the new single “Shadow People” in full:

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They will be in town on April 30th. I saw them open for Wilco a few years ago and they were great.

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On Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a paralyzing pressure we put on ourselves to create stuff that completely captures our taste. When we first start creating, our taste simply exceeds our skill. This can be painful to admit, but without acknowledging the importance of practice and iteration, this gap can never be closed.

Iterate: Make It Better

In college, I spent a free elective on a screenwriting class because I thought it would be cool to write a full-length screenplay (120+ pages). On the first day of class, our professor described how we would be critiqued: On your assigned day of the week, a section of your script would be read out loud in front of the entire class, and then everyone would take turns ripping it apart.

At first, this sounded like it was going to be brutal. I had no creative writing experience and I don’t like doing things I’m not good at in front of a lot of people. Everyone in the class seemed to share that same sentiment. Our professor then told us something that has stuck with me to this day. Perhaps one of the most important lessons I have ever learned:

Don’t worry about sucking. I can guarantee you that whatever you come up with will suck. All that matters is that you keep trying to make it better.

This seemed like such a novel idea at the time. I had never been told that I was going to be bad at something I had never even tried in such an inspiring way. Our professor went on to explain the importance of flexibility and constructive criticism when trying to tackle as daunting a task as writing a full-length screenplay. The best screenplays are revised and rewritten many, many times.

Practice Makes Perfect

After covering other procedural things, our professor asked how many of us had friends who consider themselves writers. Almost everyone in the class rose their hand. When he asked which of them had actually written anything significant, almost everyone put their hand down. Sometimes we like the identity that comes with doing something better than actually doing it.

Ira Glass talking about the building blocks of a great story.

When we look at where we want to be on a macro level, it simply won’t happen without practice. Translating your imagination onto paper, for example, is a difficult skill to master. The best writers get better not by taking classes, reading books, or going to conferences, but by simply writing. The best writers have mountains of material they have written that will probably never be shared with anyone.

In the interview above, Ira Glass talks about closing that gap between your taste and your abilities. He shares a clip from earlier in his career to show how long it took him to get to where he wanted to be. He also emphasizes the importance of creating a volume of work as a form of practice (See also: Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule).

Conclusion

I’m nowhere close to being satisfied with where my skills or creations are, and I constantly have to talk myself out of giving up. When I hit a creative obstacle like writer’s block or run out of inspiration, I have to remind myself to push through and just try and get better.

Without relentless practice and iteration, your skills and creations won’t improve and you will probably end up quiting and moving on to something new. George Orwell’s character Gordon Comstock, a writer trying to write an epic poem in Keep The Aspidistra Flying, captures what losing this struggle looks like quite well:

It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments.

Whether you’re an aspiring writer, designer, filmmaker, musician, programmer, or whatever, if you don’t have any rough material to work with, you won’t have anything to revise or rewrite, and you will ultimately end up with nothing. Don’t give up; pace yourself. Perfection can’t be attained on the first try, and having a long-term outlook is the only realistic way to approach ambitious goals.

This post was partly inspired by this HN thread. Special thanks to Professor Finley, _pius, xmasher, DocSavage, and, of course, Wikipedia for ideas and links.

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High Violet

The National’s High Violet is another album I’ve been looking forward to (it comes out May 11th) . Today they released the album version of “Bloodbuzz Ohio” on Stereogum. I really like it.

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The National’s Bryan Devendorf is one of my favorite drummers (along with Justin Peroff from Broken Social Scene). Matt Berninger’s voice is hard to get used to for some, but if you give it a chance, it grows on you.

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Forgiveness Rock Record

Broken Social Scene has been my favorite band since I first heard You Forgot It in People in 2002. Their forthcoming album, Forgiveness Rock Record, is set to come out on May 4th, and I can’t wait.

They seem to be putting up a new song or two every few weeks to be streamed for free or downloaded for money on their website. Today they added “Forced to Love” and “All to All”. “World Sick” can be downloaded for free if you sign up for their email list.

I know all you care about is giving their new stuff a listen, so I embedded their player above. “World Sick” is my favorite so far.

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Hello World!

Well, I finally got around to redesigning my personal website. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. You can still check out the old design here. (It’s funny how impressive a simple flash animation is to the non-technical crowd.)

This is has nothing to do with anything, but it’s really cool.

This time around, I wanted to convert a custom design into a WordPress theme. WordPress has its limitations, but overall it’s fun to tinker with. I’m not quite done yet. I still want to add a custom loop to list posts on the main page by categories: Design, Music, and Random. I just need to read more about The Loop.

I may have gotten a little too experimental with the typography. I thought it might be cool to justify the body paragraphs and use Hyphenator.js to automatically add soft hyphens to close gaps between words. It might be annoying, but we’ll try it and see how it goes. But of course, Helvetica Neue is a cool font, and Times New Roman, while originally designed for print, looks classy, I think.

Tell me what you think! :)

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