Week 2

Day 8: Mentor Madness

Monday, 17th November 2014 23:53

Do any research on Techstars and you quickly come across the term Mentor Madness. In the space of 3 weeks¹ you have around 80 twenty minute meetings with potential mentors. It’s not a pitch - that much has been drummed into us - it’s presenting your team and your business and seeing if there is a match with the mentor. Think of it a bit like speed dating.

Sit through that many meetings with that many people and you’re bound to get differing advice. This even has a name: Mentor Whiplash. Sounds painful. So far, it’s not as bad as it seems. While we’re seeing polar opposite advice from some mentors, we’re viewing this as A Good Thing™.

The mentor whiplash we’re seeing is on parts of the business we’re not sure about yet. If everyone turned round and said “oh, you just want to do X” then you really need to just go do X - and possibly ask yourself why you didn’t spot that in the first place. If half the mentors are saying “do X”, with the other half saying “do Y”, or even “wow, that’s a really hard problem, I don’t know!” then you can at least take solace in the fact it probably is a really hard problem - and maybe one with no right answer.

You’ve also got to bear in mind that these guys are getting a 20 minute window onto a company which may not have been explained in the best of terms² and are then having to think on their feet. It’s only really the easy questions that can get answered in these session. All you can hope for the hard questions is confirmation of the fact they’re hard and a selection of viewpoints on how best to tackle the issue.

So, day 1. We’re feeling positive. We’ve identified some great people who we’d be thrilled to have as mentors. We spent the evening debriefing and prepping for tomorrow, and then it’s just same again. Sadly I probably won’t get to go to all 80 odd meetings - although we’re early doors yet and that could end up being a blessing in disguise.

Day 9: Marathon, not a sprint

Tuesday, 18th November 2014 23:54

So my schedule for the week (Monday to Thursday) seems to be get up at 06:00, get ready for work, eat breakfast, FaceTime the family, leave the flat at 07:30, get into work for 08:00, do an 11 or 12 hour day with a small break for lunch, head back to our flats in the evening with the team, work on the business plan over dinner, debrief, blog, bed for midnight. Friday mornings are the same, but we [Rainbird] bugger off back to Norwich in the afternoon so the plan is leave the office at 15:30³ and debrief/blog on the train home.

Now that would be great if I was one of these people who only needed 4 hours sleep a night, or if I could go home and die at weekends; but I’m not and I can’t. I suffer if I don’t get my full 8 hours, and my weekends feature disturbed sleep thanks to my heavily pregnant wife who needs to get up several times in the night, plus early mornings courtesy of my young daughter who doesn’t understand the concept of a lie in.

The net result is that I’m pretty tired already and my body is starting to tell me that if I don’t slow down that it’s going to put me down. Yes, I could just knuckle under, quit my moaning and get on with it but I suspect eventually there is a big brick wall that I’d hit and I’d end up being useless to everyone.

So, day off. Sort of.

Mentor meetings in the morning, [extremely] long lunch with a very good friend of mine and colleague who was able to offer some very interesting advice and some possible introductions, back to the office to do a couple of hours work, out by 19:00 with the intention of going home and going pretty much straight to bed.

Didn’t quite manage that as Chris and I started talking about some issues that had been uncovered during the day and then started throwing around some ideas to fix these issues. Next thing you know the notepads are out and diagrams are being drawn. OK, so it’s not exactly high intensity work - and we did range over a number of topics while also cooking and eating dinner - but we still utterly failed in the task of go home, switch off, go to sleep⁴.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the mentality of working every available hour and pushing yourself as hard as you can. That’s great, but you also have to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. There are no prizes for being the first to collapse in a crumpled heap before the finish line is even in sight.

I’m not the only one in the team who decided that a little R&R wouldn’t go amiss - the table tennis table was broken out at the end of the day for a few games

Day 10: If I had a hammer…

Wednesday, 19th November 2014 21:43

Today’s plan was work 08:00-19:00, head home, gym for 20:00, cook dinner at 21:00, bed by 22:00. Didn’t quite pan out as I didn’t leave the office until 20:00, which was too late for the gym. This could be a blessing in disguise as I’m in bed for 21:20 and I will be unconscious⁵ by 22:00.

It seems that, between the mentor meetings, sponsor meetings and feedback meetings⁶, it was a head down, headphones on, get on with it type of day. Rest assured that I didn’t have my head in my hands due to despair, I was just looking at something on my iPad⁷.

I find it ironic that Apple is known for their iconic white headphones, yet the white headphones here are non Apple ones plugged into Android devices while I, the rabid fanboi, have black, non Apple ones plugged into my iPad.

The headphone tactic seems to have worked though. I’ve taken a bunch of open source modules that sort of vaguely do what I want them to do and hit them with a big virtual hammer. The resulting monstrosity should find it’s way back into the open source community in the next few days and we’ll finally have a way of doing releases that force me to update the version number and release notes rather than arbitrarily changing the version number and putting in the first few changes I can remember.

I also spent some time speccing out some new features for Rainbird which look awesome on paper. Absolutely no clue how I’m going to implement them, but hopefully the impending 8+ hours of delicious sleep⁸ will see me bright eyed and bushy tailed tomorrow and provide inspiration and insight for the challenge. Failing that I’ll just bludgeon some more modules together with my big hammer until it resembles something like what I want.

Day 11: Putting the Tech into Techstars

Thursday, 20th November 2014 23:33

We had our second Deep Dive with Jon and his team today. The Deep Dives are where we make sure that we, as a team, are heading in the right direction, review our performance for the week and set challenges for the week ahead. The feedback from this weeks meeting was overwhelmingly positive. Which you’d think would be a good thing.

Rainbird the company, as an idea, as a business plan, is accelerating. We’ve made a huge amount of progress on that front over the past two weeks. You could describe it as completely taking the company to bits and rebuilding it from scratch. Twice. You could argue that this is why they’re called accelerator programs.

Rainbird the platform, the underlying tech, is not keeping up. And that is my issue. As CTO it’s my job to ensure that the tech supports the business; after all, selling shiny awesomeness is easy.

We are not at the shiny awesomeness stage yet and there is a metric crapton⁹ of work to be done to get there. Thankfully Ben, the CEO, is a techie himself and understands this isn’t happening overnight. Sadly, however, I’m not quite so forgiving and am likely to begin birching myself for non-delivery fairly soon. And sitting there, at the back of my mind, is the little niggle of doubt that all developers seem to get. What if I’m not up to the task? What if I can’t make it do what we need?

So my perverse logic goes that if we’d started the Deep Dives with us having our backsides handed to us on a plate then we could knuckle under, show improvement week on week, and gain credit for that.

By starting well we’ve set the bar high and now need to consistently exceed that standard. And to help us do that I need to ensure that the tech is doing what the business needs - so no pressure then.

Day 12: The Team

Friday, 21st November 2014 19:26

Barry, Dom, Chris, Ben and Nathan (James photographing)

So who are we? Who is Team Rainbird? Well this is us, or at least most of us. James is the one taking the photo so he’s not in the picture sadly.

James is the adult of the bunch, the sensible one. He’s also the one with taste, enjoying the finer things in life. James dresses well - the whole t-shirt and hoodie look doesn’t sit well with him, a fact that amuses the rest of us greatly.

On the left it’s Brand Barry, or Bazminda to his mates. Bazminda is smooth. Very smooth. Something that works well when he’s negotiating. Freebies, discounts and upgrades just seem to find him. Another snappy dresser (or a flagrant copier of James) it can be hard to tell Bazminda apart from James if you just go by the clothes, although there is a clear hight difference.

Next up there’s me. You can tell I’m at home in a hoodie, I live in them. You can make your own mind up about the other aspects of me from the rest of this book.

In the middle, that’s Stumpy¹⁰ - unsurprising really as even in the foreground he’s shorter than all of us. A lover of tweed, and sensible cardigans, we’ve tried to beat the “old codger” out of him and remind him that he’s part of a cool and hip startup. I think that explains the pose.

Then there’s Ben. He’s the gaffer, and the brains behind the outfit. Rainbird is his baby and his labour of love. A connoisseur of proper beers and the consummate geek, Ben makes an excellent counterpoint for James. The two make a good team.

Lastly there’s Nathan - the one who got lost on the first day. Nothing fazes Nathan, not even getting lost in the middle of London. I’m not saying it happens a lot, but I do find myself having to point him in the right direction and saying “Run, Forrest, Run!”. I may start calling him Forrest.

Day 14: N’arch - A city in sync

Sunday, 23rd November 2014 21:16

I’m pretty sure Jon Bradford never thought he’d find himself in Norwich talking to a potential Techstars company. After all, it’s Norwich. We do mustard, turkeys and insurance and that’s it.

Wrong.

Norwich is home to a burgeoning tech scene which surprises many people. A bunch of us have been making a load of noise about this for a while - hell, we even have an annual tech - so it was little surprise to me when SyncNorwich said there were putting on a 54 hour hackathon called SyncTheCity.

Rainbird were, of course, all over this and we had hoped to send the entire company for the entire event. Techstars rather threw a spanner in the works there, especially since Ben and I were mentors and James was judging (along with Jon Bradford, who was going to find himself in Norwich for a second time this year¹¹). We settled for sponsoring the event and providing the coffee. Rainbird is all about the coffee.

As it was I was only able to make the Saturday. I wasn’t actually sure how much help I’d be given I’d not been involved with the teams from hour 1, but it turns out I needn’t have worried. By Saturday the teams had a good idea of what it was they were pitching, and what their product/company was doing so the mentors helped with pitch practice. After a week of mentor madness the ability to sit on the other side of the fence and give advice as other people pitched was a breath of fresh air. I may have looked unimpressed, but that’s just severe tiredness; I was in fact seriously impressed with the quality of what the 11 teams had produced. I’m looking forward to the 2015 event and hope to make all 3 days for that one.

Watching the teams pitch at Sync The City (Photo courtesy of Tim Stephenson - http://www.timstephensonphotography.co.uk/)

With SyncTheCity done it’s now back to London for a 3 week stint¹² where I can hopefully get stuck into some of the development that needs doing on Rainbird and start pushing out some funky new features.