CrowdSourcing Starting Up Part 3, Vague thoughts

Part three:  Note that for part three, this is very disorganized.  That’s mostly due to that like most fears and concerns, those sorts of lists are inherently disorganized.  I realize it is also on the long side.  Bear with that.  You plan out the next few years of your life on paper somewhere and see how you feel.

The Number 2 through whatever questions, some more vague thoughts that had to go somewhere.

• There are a number of little startup bootcampy things  in a variety of locations in parts of the country, most in N. California, the Valley.  I have a graduation date at Latest June 13, which is not in the Valley.  (If you are curious, it is in a fabulously lovely school in Chicago).  I finish classes earlier than that though.  (Current expected date for that is December 13)  So there is some dead time while I (should) do BA work.  I can (and should) do other things. The question is, what should I do that will get me the furthest in any of these projects, considering some of these have first mover advantage more than others. (Definitely the first Internet bank will….)
• Not all the startup bootcampy things are proven concepts, as already been hashed out.  As with anything, hedge a little when you double down.  How else are you going to feed yourself?  This concept is very new, although the idea of mentorship is not at all.  What else is out there?  How do you take care of the company so it gets to the end (as in IPO or bought out), yourself as an entrepreneur, your employees, your board, everyone and everything?  Making the world a slightly better place and not crappy corporate, and instead good corporate, would be nice.
• The Valley has a strong tech community to lean on.  Especially if you are the wandering around type.  It feels a little more normal there.  Normalcy is a good thing.
• Is a startup bootcampy thing the best way of doing this?  Particularly with these sets of ideas, (so far), this set probably should be founded in all places, NY (where I was brought up).  Law and financial industry is located here, and these are the sort of industries where you might even want a lawyer on hand or an economist on hand so you don’t frack up.  Nothing like hearing the ABA is after you because you radicalized the Law Industry, from California, when the Big Offices are in NY.   Of those startup bootcampy things, the best option would be TechStars Boston.  Boston has a largish legal community, isn’t far from NY, and has a really interesting Jewish community that behaves a lot like startup-land.  Since I might have to stick around for a bit, it might be worthwhile to think about that stuff.
• At the same time I’m nervous as all hell.   Being nervous about building something is normal, especially when you don’t know lots of people who are building lots of things on their own. Being in camp makes that normal too.  It teaches you the skills you need, and helps get over choking.  Are there other ways of getting those skills?
• NY is NY man.  I have super strong ties here, for cultural, religious, familial, etc.  NY is in the blood.  Though My Other Favorite city is SF. I was briefly there, and it was the first place I started to feel independent in my life.  I have a few contacts here and there (and they are slowly going back to NY…which just goes to show you the power of NY.).
• I am nervously foraying into coding, and I feel like I suck at it, and would probably prefer someone around who is says “You go,” or “We can do this” if we both suck.  Or not suck, just confused.  At least part of the time.  Coding is scary.  I’ve figured out that OOP is like crocheting and knitting, that you pass objects through different parts- yet I couldn’t tell you which parts go first. (Why object a versus object b, can someone explain this, and what’s a string, I started to teach myself on a visual language so I could see what I was doing for comfortlevelsakes.)  It’s feels a lot like knitting a really ugly scarf.  With scary math.  Partners that get that thought, are hard to find.  Where do you find those people????
• Equity and loss of Equity as dilution occurs versus the amount of capital around versus EBIDTA versus cold hard profit is a big question.  Same goes with what I have called the “YOU ARE REALLY PRESTIGIOUS BECAUSE YOU DID A STARTUP WITH US AND THEREFORE GET A STICKER IN TECHCRUNCH” issue.  Although I definitely need that level of advice, having actually seen different kinds across different cultures that level of “prestige sticker effect” (I even own a bunch myself, as well as thrown out a bunch too, depending on who you ask.) is the prestige issue all there is?  A part of me on that issue would give up far more equity, to my other cofounder, if the person was very highly involved from the start on a day to day level, because I am so young and a bit errr, nervous.  If there was such thing as cross-gapped training in starting up (as in we set people up to found companies and teach them how to do this by setting up previous successful founders with people who want to be in order to learn that sort of craft), I would prefer that in a heartbeat.  The status thing is a *shrug*.  I care more for the craft of it.  How many people walk around saying this is about the craft of companies
• There are women hanging around this scene.  Just less women.  It feels weird, because not every issue you can relate to.  Certain things, are going to just be guy things, and certain things, girl things (that’s just the way the world works.)  I wonder if my ideas and choices will be off putting and wonky, or at least taken less seriously, especially because in person I go “Really!” in a mezzo, and look cute. (If you’ve ever wondered how I get random market research on phones on the train, that’s essentially how.)    Further, I was fairly traditionally raised, in a modern to centrist Orthodox Jewish family, (or for any of the Israelis who end of finding this, a Dati family).  Highly gendered roles are somewhat more normal to me than I perceive than in my college friends, though I’ve also been raised on a self-fed diet of Sleater-Kinney and Betty Friedan.  The mixture will warp your worldview in some fun ways! (That’s a joke, it makes me more close to the national “average” person, yet still get why someone would go for both the very liberal or very conservative position)  I can and have cooked a killer meal in 4 hours flat of four courses.  I taught kids.  I’m not going to lie, at some point before I turn 30 (that’s ummm, 6.5 years away, I think, and definitely before 35), I should scale slightly back so I can get married and have kids, or my mom will kill me I think that’s normal for most women who have a mom instinct and have some sense of traditional roles…I may not be super traditional, I post on a blog of mostly men, yet still in person I can and will chat up the right people about these issues.  Although this should be a long post in and of itself, since it has heated up the blogosphere, I recognize gendering for both its positive and negative effects, and I’m gendered woman.  To be very straight on, it will be very strange for some to recognize that the wispy girl in the corner is a founder.  All the women who’ve I read on founding are straight on about it being stylistically different.  In some ways, I’m responding to the men, women,. and children in my life.  (Right now primarily men, and I can see myself serially doing this as I grow and change and as my lifestyle changes, responding to the people I meet and what they tell me.)  Even if these companies as objects seem masculine- it comes from maternal instinct of watching and wanting to take care of people in my life, and solving problems so they kvetch less…making people happy is the name of the game   This could be a whole post in and of itself though.
• Waiting.  Should I wait, for skills reasons?  Go work for a while?  Find something stable to learn my bearings?  I get the feeling that average age of startup people is not 23, 24 (or straight out of college), but a tad older.  Is it worth it to wait to get some life skills and work skills down pat?
• Being Jewish.  I grew up in a more, conservative (not the Conservative Movement,) element of the Jewish community.  One of the reasons my perspective seems very unique is because I was raise in an Orthodox fashion, and that I have friends and family, and go back to and rely on a community that has elements more sociological and functionally religion than I am./  In some ways this is my home.  I’ve met a few people in this business.  Most people can’t conceive of a world where they turn off their stuff for 25 hours straight or more (Rosh Hashanna weekend this year, 2009, will be about 49 hours straight with no Internet Tech, this would drive most people insane.)  I have relatives who will never own a TV, and I know people brought up that they were never supposed to own a computer (yet everyone seems to have a cellphone- and they try blocking the net).  At the same time, they use videoconferencing to go on dates to meet their wives across the country, as well as educate their children in foreign languages…  Questions of impactfulness seem very real here because the places and the people I live and are friends with out of culture, are working to manage technology in their every day lives. (I’ve gotten some interesting questions as a result, such as “My daughter likes to read lots of books, should we buy her a Kindle?  And then the discussion will veer into Shabbos, DRM, Lending of Books, all sorts of things you would never expect that occur because it’s a fact to face community and you don’t use a lot of tech because you don’t turn on electricity one day a week)  I don’t see enough people asking enough questions, and even if here the questions are legalistic and in order to do something, at least its a question.  Further, there is a dimension of class jumping.  See something like Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor.  In some senses, there is a religio-ethnic class jump.  I have no idea how the rest of the world will react to me, and that is also really frightening.  I’d like to have a permeable boundary, and I don’t know if it is possible.  It’s difficult when you need support systems on both ends (and those are hard to find-I’m slowly finding them, yet I realize how hard they are)
• Any other issues you feel like adding, please add.