red eyes, white flakes

The Mustang made it back in one piece, despite the epic chase sequence that occurred somewhere in the hills of San Francisco [reenactment footage not necessarily accurate].

After a few days loaded with meetings, you begin to get tired of hearing the sound of your own voice, but the answers to familiar questions come even faster as you’ve honed your delivery. By the time we found our gate at SFO, those cramped airline seats were starting to look very comfortable.

Our red-eye flight got into Logan in the early morning and we were bombarded with massive, fluffy snowflakes. Only a day earlier we had been enjoying the mild climate of Palo Alto, now we saw the first ominous signs of the winter ahead of us. We’re bound to be productive – considering how infrequently we leave the apartment already – as long as we have enough canned goods to sustain us.

There’s going to be a busy week ahead of us, but we’re enjoying a day off today. This day off could be attributed to jetlag, but we’re in fact hosting a Halloween party tonight. All work and no play…

//thanks to destgulch.com for the footage from Bullitt. Despite what Steve may say, he looks nothing like Steve McQueen

reddit goes west

We're in Kal-ee-for-nya (according to my mother) until a red-eye flight takes us back to Logan on Friday night. One thing worth noting: Avis will not only rent to the under 25 crowd, they'll also offer you a Mustang upgrade for only $3 a day. We had to choose between a Chevy Cobalt and a 2005 Mustang hardtop.

Maybe we should have gotten that optional insurance policy...

lunch, an excuse to go outdoors

You begin to need reasons to leave the apartment. Yesterday, lunch was it. We had a meeting scheduled and it was up to us to choose the location, so the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Sq. seemed to be an appropriate choice. Ever since our first night in Cambridge, this hulking cafe has been a landmark etched into our heads and butchered by our tongues. "Oh yeah, the uh-buh-pah, it's right next to the Harvard T-stop."

We set out for the cafe a good 10 minutes earlier than we probably needed to (but better early than late for these sorts of things, right?). This was a pretty tame "fall" day in Cambridge, mind you, so it was cold and only lightly raining. I hesitate to even call it "fall," given that I have seen little evidence to show that this region of the U.S. even experiences what we in the Mid-Atlantic would refer to as "fall" (or autumn, in some circles). It seemed like over the course of a week, the weather went from sweltering to frigid and dreary. This, I was later told, was the transition from summer to winter.

But back to lunch, one crucial mistake was that we had no idea who to look for, nor had we given him any description of what we looked like. We were just the two awkward guys standing outside in the drizzle. There are only so many ways to play off this all-too-typical exchange:

"Hey, we're Steve and Alexis from reddit."

*pause*

"Reddit? What? Who are you? What do you want from me?"

We did eventually find who we were looking for and we even got treated to lunch. It’s nice to get a meal every now and then that hasn’t already been pre-prepared-cooked-and-packaged.

You might be startup-founder if you consider adding milk to cereal an act of “food preparation.” Many don’t even put in that much effort.

polyphasic sleep: a groggy journey toward higher productivity

You never feel like you're being quite productive enough, so something that promises only 2-3hrs. a day of sleep seems like a really great idea. Steve found this link on reddit a day ago and got the idea to make the switch. Apparently, da Vinci, Edison, and Jefferson practiced this method with great success -- we've set our bars much lower.

The nocturnal lifestyle is already a natural part of our existence, so it wasn't a very hard sell, especially if it would mean more productivity (and ultimately, more time for WoW). Our new sleeping schedule would replace the "monophasic" sleep of mere mortals with 6 power naps spread throughout the day at 4 hour intervals.

Needless to say, there is typical about a week or so of intense psychological stress and fatigue as you punish your brain into believing that it only needs these small chunks of rest. We didn't even make it long enough to hallucinate. This morning, only 3 naps into our lifestyle change, our roommate found us slumped on our respective keyboards.

Biological need for sleep: 1
Steve & Alexis: 0

how we got here, where we're going

It all started this past March with a talk aptly entitled "How to Start a Startup" being given at Harvard by Paul Graham. An application and a series of interviews later, we were fortunate enough to be admitted to Y Combinator's Summer Founders Program. A few months have passed and it looks like Steve (spez) and I (kn0thing) can keep living this dream for about another year (notwithstanding a sudden increase in the cost of frozen pizzas). If you're interested in the inner workings of startup life -- or you're my mom, and are wondering what your son is doing with his life -- hopefully we can provide you with some insight, or at the very least, entertainment.