Week 1

Day 1: Treasure Hunt

Monday, 10th November 2014 22:15

Arrive early. Watch as one of our team manages to bugger up the entry system (albeit not too badly). Get settled. Start introducing ourselves. Sit through a long (but interesting) introductory presentation. Get introduced to everyone. Instantly forget everyone’s name.

Lunch.

Head out for a treasure hunt. Decide not to take umbrella because, hey, what’s the worst that could happen? Get wet. Meet some really cool new people. Rescue team member who gets separated from their group¹. Have a few beers. Meet more people. Have a curry. Meet more people. Head back to the office. Grab stuff, go back to the flat². Check email. Check Twitter. Check chat. Blog. Die.

And in the background, relentlessly ticking down, is this thing.

The Techstars Clock of Doom

Day 2: Daddy needs a new pair of shoes

Wednesday, 12th November 2014 00:20

I need a new pair of shoes, quite desperately. The whys and the wherefores are unimportant. I simply need to go to a shop, try on shoes, find a pair that actually fit and purchase them.

Given day 2 of Techstars is ostensibly a “day off” - that is no activities or meetings are planned - I figured I could pop out over lunch some time. I was wrong.

Cue one fifteen and a half hour day focusing on our “homework” (the real reason we had the day off from other activities), actually getting some work done, waiting for photographs to be taken³, having working lunches, having a working dinner⁴, and finally finishing our homework⁵.

Maybe “day off” was a poor choice of words.

Tomorrow morning is rammed with meetings, but the afternoon is looking promising to steal some time and sort the footwear problem. I could probably do with going to a supermarket too. And sleep. Sleep would be nice. So with that, I bid you goodnight⁶…

Burning the midnight oil

Day 3: The first rule of CTO club…

Thursday, 13th November 2014 00:19

I think it’s safe to say I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I suspect this is going to be a common theme given it’s 23:50 already and I’m still not quite ready to hit the sack. That said, I think we barely managed a 13 hour working day before buggering off to get some food. Chuck in the fact that I had to run to Oxford Street⁷ during lunch and it was practically a half day.

Today was a bit different for me as I had CTO club. The first rule of CTO club is that you don’t talk about CTO club. The second rule of CTO club is that if you don’t get stuck into the chocolate croissants near the beginning of the meeting I’m going to have eaten them all⁸.

The CTO meetings are likely to be invaluable to me as, while I bring a fair amount of experience to the table, most of that experience is as a developer. OK, so I’ve been a team lead, development head and even a Head of IT before, but all that’s crammed into the very last portion of my career. Part of me still views myself as a naive 22 year old who’s just starting out in a support team.

We also had our first Deep Dive with Jon Bradford⁹ and his team. It was nowhere near as brutal as I was expecting - in fact it was practically pleasant. Yes, there are issues that we need to address, some quite large, but then that’s why we’re here; to get help and guidance on some of these larger issues. There’d be no point in doing the programme if we had it all worked out.

We topped the day off with dinner and a team discussion over the outcome of both the Deep Dive, and last nights homework (which was very much an exercise to get us thinking about the kinds of issues that would be bought up in the Deep Dive). I also have some of my own ideas, but I’m reserving judgement until after the first week of mentor meetings.

I then utterly failed to get to the supermarket to buy the growing list of things I could really do with buying. The likelihood is that I will completely fail to get to the shops tomorrow today too as we’ve got a 6pm meeting, followed by a Techstars Alumni panel, followed by drinks… also, how the hell is it Thursday already?

Psychologically there is a big difference between 100 days left and 99 days left

Day 4: Screw the diet

Thursday, 13th November 2014 23:57

Before we came to London there was a very real understanding that we were going to have to look after ourselves, insofar as making sure we ate reasonable well, exercised, and all that malarkey. The gym has been sadly absent this week, purely down to the lack of gym passes (which should be sorted tomorrow), but I have been making a point of doing some exercises in my room every morning and I use the stairs rather than the lifts.

On the food front it’s been a mixed bag. Dinners have, on the whole, not been great. Breakfasts have been healthy, and lunches haven’t been all that bad. Treats and snacks have been pretty much non-existent - I know, how pious am I?

Except I’m getting 6 hours sleep a night, with pretty much 17 hours a day dedicated to working and networking and the final hour left for me to do mundane things like shower and walk to and from work. Annoyingly I’d like to be able to spend more time working each day, it’s just physically impossible.

You need to consider that I’m basically a highly evolved machine designed to turn sugar into code. It’s what I do. And today I hit the wall. So I did the only thing I knew: headed to the supermarket and bough £15 worth of sugary and chocolatey crap. That did the job.

Obviously a large bar of chocolate, half a box of Ferrero Rocher, a chocolate doughnut and half a large bag of sweets isn’t a sustainable diet, but I do think it represented the bursting of the dam… actually, the chocolate croissant and hot chocolate I had this morning, followed by a fairly large tube of Smarties was the bursting of the dam, this was more like the flooding of the lowlands and the destruction of everything downstream, but I digress.

The choices seem to be scale back the hours, sleep more, eat properly, exercise and generally be sensible; or accept that the diet may need to involve more sugar if I’m going to be able to maintain the pace I’ve set. My personal preference? Given how hard it is to get into Techstars your options are either go large, or go home¹⁰, so screw the diet!

I should probably point out that the other 5 are all eating nothing but organic health foods and drinking pure spring water. It’s just me eating the crap, and I’m not just saying that for the benefit of other peoples wives…

Day 5: Week 1 Summary

Friday, 14th November 2014 20:21

So you’ll recall that I came to London with a suitcase, bag and rucksack. Look - there’s even a photo to remind you.

Everything I need for three months… and some stuff I don’t. Doesn’t seem enough

I’ve returned to Norfolk for the weekend with just the bag and the rucksack (no photo, it’s dark - use your imagination and remove the suitcase from the scene). I wouldn’t have bought the bag, but I’ve quite literally not had time to do any washing during the week¹¹. I’ve not really had time to do anything other than work, talk about work and network.

It’s a really bizarre feeling to be heading home. In some respects it feels like I’ve barely been away. It’s not even been 5 minutes since we first stepped into the Techstars office and time is just running away from me. In other respects it feels like it’s been 5 months since I left home and we’ve achieved an awesome amount of stuff. Time is becoming malleable, and my recollection of when events happened unreliable. We were warned this would happen¹², I just thought it would take a few weeks to kick in.

Weirdly enough my view on a few things around the Rainbird, Techstars, and the cohort seem to also suffer from many diametrically opposed but simultaneously held theories¹³. You could describe them as quantum states waiting to collapse, although that’s probably me just talking out of my arse due to extreme fatigue. Who knows.

So, what have we achieved? Well, we’re taken the company to bits and we’re starting to put it back together. We’re likely to find a few washers left over when we’re done (“So where does this bit go?”), but that’s a way away. At the moment we’ve got past the list of bits we should have and are now at the little pictograms of the guy telling us the tools we’ll need, how many people are needed to lift the company during building, and what to do if bits are needed¹⁴.

We’ve not killed each other, fallen out with each other, sniped at each other or had an argument¹⁵. This is a good thing and will become a bigger and bigger achievement as time goes on.

We’ve written some code. OK, Nathan has written some code and Ben and I have pissed about with a few simple changes, but hey, you know, teamwork and all that. We’ve even released Beta 0.2.0 which really just means that I finally remembered to increment the version number.

And we’ve met some really cool, and scarily intelligent people which is more than a bit daunting. We’re still getting to know each other, but I can already see that we’re forming bonds that will last well beyond this process. Oh, and since I know that this is read by the wives and girlfriends of Team Rainbird I feel morally obliged to state that we’ve managed to achieve the perfect mix of eating well, exercising properly and looking after ourselves. We’ve also put aside time each day to tell each other how wonderful our families and loved ones are, and quietly reflect each night on how lucky we are while all the time counting the milliseconds until we are reunited¹⁶.

Day 7: Week 2 Prologue

Sunday, 16th November 2014 21:43

So I had a big long debate with myself over whether I should do weekend updates or not - and also how to deal with the day numberings. Techstars is a 13 week, or 90 day programme. The astute among you will notice that 13 x 7 = 91. Demo Day is on the last Friday so we shouldn’t include the last weekend, and I’m pretty sure that would make it an 89 day programme¹⁷.

It gets worse though. Thanks to Christmas we also get a 2 week break with the programme being split into one 7 week and one 6 week session.

So, our Clock of Doom counted down from 103¹⁸ days which is 14 full weeks and one 5 day week. All of which begs the question: “How the hell do I number these?”

The solution I’m going to go for is to count weeks as 7 days long, and then ignore the two week break. This means that anyone doing any research on what it’s like to be at Techstars London will be able to correlate entries with the actual programme rather than time elapsed for me. Make sense? No? Tough, I’m just killing time on the train.

Which leads me to the reason why I decided I would do an update this weekend: I’ve got a 3 hour commute most weekends and it’s going to get old fast. I know this because I’m only on the 3^rd journey¹⁹ for Techstars and it’s already got old. I’ve also previously spent a few months doing the Cromer to London run at weekends when I first started seeing my wife. It wasn’t fun then either.

As to my weekend, it was great to see my family again. When I went into my daughters room on Saturday morning²⁰ I was greeted by an emphatic “Daddy, I knew you’d come back!” followed by her launching herself at me for a hug. This, of course, makes the leaving again all the harder.

Oh, and I got some sleep, although not quite as much as I needed. I’ve noticed, looking back on last week, that the entries were getting more and more manic as my tired brain decided to filter less and less²¹. I suspect this will be a recurring pattern with Fridays post’s being the most flippant.