I have recently learned that there is indeed a reader of this blog! (Hi Mike!) So now I feel obligated to inform the blogosphere of the recent Tubes news. Tubes has moved to the Bay Area, and Scott went with it. Maybe it’s the other way around?

Why move? Not a whole lot going on in Sacramento/Davis for startups, and there’s tons more opportunity to meet the right kind of people (collaborators, investors, single women , etc) in the city, South Bay, etc.

So what’s new? Tubes is a good idea worth doing, many good ideas worth doing, so expect to see more of it very soon. One thing that didn’t work was managing a distributed team of loosely committed developers. Why that didn’t work and why they weren’t committed I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I never had the team right. If you look at success stories from Google to eBay to Craigslist to Facebook, we never even remotely resembled the structure of those companies in their beginnings. Maybe I just wasn’t following the right formula. I think we’ve been close a couple of times, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Another thing that didn’t work was the Symfony framework, for a few reasons. For one thing it’s slow as fuck (unless you do a lot of optimization), and to build an effective app on Symfony you need dedicated people who are intimate with the framework. I stayed on the functional and interaction design side of things, because while I’m comfortable with PHP/MySQL, Symfony freaks me the fuck out. From the Symfony team came some very intelligent backend design work that will be carried over into the current system, so that’s a positive. Since the n^th crash and burn, I’ve gotten involved with coding along with a good friend who’s been in and out of Tubes since the very beginning. If it weren’t for him, I might have never gotten into web development myself, because he got me my first web development job at Rabbit Semiconductor.

Tubes is being built with the standard LAMP toolset, using a basic, typical and custom MVC design pattern. When we need to grow, it’ll be easy for a good developer to acclimate to the system because it’s a regular PHP app.

We’re a small team now, just two guys building the app and a program manager with nothing to do (except bitch and moan incessantly, but for good reason).

Losing really sucks, it’s been a difficult transition to come to the full realization that what I did was a failure. But I also realize that it’s just part of the game. Historically some of the most successful athletes/actors/musicians/entrepreneurs are some of the biggest failures in terms of how many times they’ve struck out. It’s a numbers game, you can apply it to business, to baseball, to dating, you name it. So don’t just quit. Take a break, reassess, absorb what you’ve learned and then come back faster, smarter and stronger. I am committed to building Tubes, and as Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it:

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen”

• “The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free” by Michael Arrington
• Throwdown’s lead singer urges fans to steal their music
• Radiohead gives it away
• 50 Cent says it how it is
• Nine Inch Nails breaks free
• Reznor: “Steal it!” (YouTube)
• Prince gives it away

Fast forward 3 years, and this is where it’s going.

That’s right, there is a tech/startup scene in Sac and we like to eat. We’re going to do Chinese food at Peking Palace which is on Folsom Blvd between Watt and Bradshaw. Kalsey set up the Upcoming event, and here’s a Google map to the place. We’re planning on meeting at 7 PM and ordering a bunch of stuff to share. See you there!

I’m very pleased to announce that Tubes’ newest advisor is Adam Kalsey. He was the founder of Pheedo and more recently Feed Crier. Kalsey is a web guru so he’ll be a very valuable tech resource for us. Welcome!

Woodstock’s pizza in Davis, Thursday March 16th, 7:00PM in the front area of the adjacent room (the one with the bar). See you all there!

Adam Kalsey and I have arranged the first of many Sac Geek Dinners. Actually it’s going to be in Davis, but we’ll probably move it around because variety is the spice of life. Traditionally the Bay Area gets all the fun stuff, but that is no longer! Everybody is invited but be warned you will be surrounded by geekery. And please RSVP (comment) on this blog or send me an email so I can warn the restaurant if we anticipate a bigger crowd. There is free WiFi so bring your notebook if you want, and bring your beer goggles in case you want to put the computer away and have a good time. Watch this blog for more details!

When: Thursday, March 16th 2006 at 7:00PM

Where: Woodstock’s Pizza in Davis, CA

My friend Adam Kalsey’s kids are selling candy bars for their little league, and Adam is helping by allowing people to donate online via Paypal or Amazon. Since shipping candy bars through the mail is not cost-effective, Adam is going to donate them to a Sacramento children’s charity. This is a great opportunity to help the little league, help a local charity, and avoid a few extra pounds by not eating a few dozen chocolate bars! For more info check out Adam’s blog.

I’ve been an advocate of friend-to-friend (F2F) filesharing for a long time. Rather than opening up your shared files to tens of thousands of peering eyes, you only give access to a selective group of people that you know and trust. Since most media sharing is typically based on recommendations via word-of-mouth, it only makes sense to transfer files directly. Most word-of-mouth online takes place around IM, forums and email, but filesharing hasn’t yet really found a fit in that mix.

So I tend to keep track of what’s out there in startup land, and AllPeers from day one gave me a major stiffy Yeah they can still screw it up if they don’t keep the focus on useful functionality, but I think they really have an opportunity. Anyway they just raised a round A so congrats guys. As usual TechCrunch has a great review of how the software works.

The highlight of the evening was a tie between the Taco truck and the chocolate fountain, but there was also the rare opportunity to photo the Scotts together. From left to right: me … Scott J. … Scott R.

Guy Kawasaki was an early helper with Tubes in introducing me to some VC lawyers. The thing I remember most about him is that he once said at The Art of the Start conference, that he feels like a woman in a man’s body. I can’t even remember the context but if you know guy… it’s probably the type of thing you’d expect him to say Anyway he’s a great source of wisdom but we still don’t use macs and now he’s giving it away for free on his blog. One of his most recent posts offers tips on raising angel money.

In a very related article at CNN Money, Michael Copeland goes over some of the finer points of navigating the angel world.