What I learned during 2011

I learned a heck of a lot in 2011. I began the year in my investor relations role and gained valuable experience about how large companies manage coms. A few months into the year I was forced to make a decision on my next job. I could either follow the suggested path in audit, or take a path less traveled and work for someone I really liked. From the beginning, I never felt particularly interested in doing audit. I had a little bit of experience from college, and it had left a sour taste. My gut said take the other job, and I did. Today I can say I know I made the right choice. Lesson: Follow your gut

In my new job I learned a heck of a lot about financial services. From end of lease, to credit ratings, to subsidy. It’s a very interesting business, and I feel like I’m asking the right questions and putting together interesting data for my boss.

I continued to grow in my trading of naked options. Closing 2 positions with 1000% gains, but also had my fair share of losers. I need to continue to be patient, take calculated risks, and always have bullets ready when I see the right opportunity. Thinking the best strategy might just be companies with lots of cash flow, and high dividends, and simply just reinvesting.

I gained confidence by contacting a VC and traveling to San Diego to meet with him and pitch some ideas. Things went well, and we still trade emails today. The cost of the trip has already been recovered from making the contact.

I learned about trademarks, starting an LLC, and how it feels to get a cease and desist from your alamarter. I learned how to respond to such letters, and am excited to see what the outcome is.

I learned I can make $20 a month from youtube for a video a made, but no idea why it’s got 100k plus hits now. Still trying other videos, but no such luck… 20 videos like this would be awesome.

I learned I can still drink like I did in college, run almost as fast (still improving from this summer), and experimented cooking new dishes.

I learned about real estate, and made offers on several houses, none of yet to be accepted, but still looking for the perfect one. I like this one.

I learned that grad school is expensive, and it doesn’t make sense for me to go unless I stay in state at UT.

I watched several episodes of pickers and storage wars and added to my knowledge of antiques and such.

In 2012 I am looking forward to continuing to learn. I have some fun new ideas for DFS I need to start working on. I’ve got a feeling Dwindeals will be the side project i’ve been looking for to succeed (trust your gut). Finally, I want to learn something about beer.

Discussion in adding a 4th partner

A lot of really good stuff here, and I agree with a lot of it.

As per core competencies of the company this is how I vision it:
Unique, simple to use website (Jon to build this)
Customer engagement via multiple platforms such as email, social (void, but not essential today)
Sales model with merchants that provides quality products (I dont care how good 1 & 2 are, sales is very important)

Not core competencies:
Finance, Accounting, Law

We could model out every bit of how much it would cost to outsource the entire project, none of us are needed, and each of the core skills can be replaced at the expense of money. However, we can't outsource a team that is completely connected, and driven towards one goal.  Totally agree that there needs to be a pool set aside for investments, future employee awards ect. But the pool doesnt need to be all that large. And we can think about voting rights on the board as 100%.  Think about this, say in 3-4 months we're on track to hit $100k in revenue in a year, I would say it's not unlikely to be able to raise cash that would give us a $2M valuation (20x revenue), and if we could show we're still growing even more. Then giving away options becomes very interesting. You offer someone options worth $50k pending the company reaches a $4M valuation and you're giving a pretty nice reward for only 1.25% of the company's equity, if the company doesnt double it costs us nothing.

Let's make sure we view the forest and not the trees here. We don't have a product, just an idea. Let's not let some possible future value of the company blind us to executing something we think has potential. I want to make sure we're as initially successful as possible, but I want to make sure everything is fair. I need some help understanding how labor demanding email marketing is other than designing a pretty email and then changing the products every day. I would assume John also has skills in taking that database of emails and slicing it different ways, find anomalies and arbitrages in the data that will help us with converting sales .

Startup Party Austin

Last night my buddy Rafael and I went to a holiday party that 5 different start ups put on. It was pretty good. Free booze, and plenty of interesting people trying to start their own projects. We brought our latest kickstarter project battleshots to try to get some buzz around it. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Also we need to check out bootstrap austin. 2nd time it's been suggested to us