Before anyone starts asking why am I giving marriage advice, I must say this applies very much to tech and startup life-style!
Anyway, the secret to a happy marriage is to share less!
Let me explain by this transcript of a conversation we had Friday night. For context purposes, I have 5 logos for the Seattle 2.0 blog that I wanted some help deciding, so I showed her the logos...
Me: Which of these logos do you like best? Her: What's that? Me: What? Her: Why there is a "2.0" after the word Seattle? -- Note: she is in tech as well. Me: What? Her: What does "Seattle 2.0" means? What is it? Me: [laughing] You have no idea of what I do for a living, do you?
When I compare us to other couples that we know, and not that is any indication of happiness, we noticed that we rarely talk on the phone. We mostly exchange emails, once or twice a day. And when we get home and go into the "how's your day" routine, none of us ramble for 15 minutes explaining little details of our boring day -- no matter how exciting a news is for you, it'll be an order of magnitude less exciting for anyone else.
There you have it, my wife doesn't even know I run one of the most popular blogs for tech startups in Seattle!
And just to avoid any "funny" comments, my wife does know I quit Microsoft and I have a Startup. I told her last month.
For the last few months you've seen me writing less and less on this blog.
I write about what I'm living in the moment, but we have two news coming out tomorrow that took almost all my time over the last few months. Also, to maximize the punch of the news items, I had to keep it quiet. But expect a flood of very powerful, insightful and revealing blog posts starting after the press releases hit the wire!
The big news is actually two news items and is pretty big for all people involved with Sampa. First, we closed a $1M financing round with several local and Bay-area angel investors. Second, and most importantly, we released the version 2 of our product that will make a dramatic change to our engagement, stickness and viral rates.
On the financing side, we got great names investing on us, including a lot of great people that didn't want to come public about it for personal reasons, but some angels are ok to be named, including: Geoff Entress (Madrona Venture Group), Alex Algard (WhitePages.com), Jon Lazarus, Rick Schell (VC at OnSet),John Hansen (ex-Lightsurf) and Mike Koss (StartPad). To all our investors, I'm very thankful for your belief in what we are doing and we know this is just the beginning. I want you to know I'll do my best to make this work!
Funding is great, but doesn't get you anywhere if you don't put it to good use. And that leads us to our new product launch. That is the big news of the day.
We chopped the head off!
In the end of November we decided that there was nothing that we should re-use from the existing interface into the new interface (almost nothing). So we freed ourselves (and our minds) of have to be constrained by what exists already. Sampa, technically is a combination of multiple systems and components that create the service, but for our users it's the UI!
We re-created about 20% of the service (the part that users see) and made it amazingly trivial for anyone to create a web site. The flip side is that we had to remove some features to make it simpler, and we won't put them back in unless we can figure out a way to make it fit and be easy to use. We got bloated, and now we are slim, slick and cool.
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that I wanted some help deciding, so I showed her the logos...
September, 2007